On 26 June 2026, the Financial Times ran a piece titled “The shrinking arguments for degrowth.” Written by John Burn-Murdoch, the FT’s chief data reporter, the column argues that “the idea that economic growth is a barrier to achieving better outcomes is at best outdated, in many cases a misreading of the data.” He builds his case in five steps: (1) growth reduces environmental impact, (2) eradicates poverty, (3) raises all wages, and (4) improves wellbeing, and therefore (5) degrowth is a terrible idea (hence the title of the piece). I take each claim in turn and show that none survives careful scrutiny. 

Claim n°1: Green growth

Green growth is the kind of zombie argument that keeps coming back no matter how many times the evidence buries it. John Burn-Murdoch resurrects it with confidence (I’ve kept the original hyperlinks from the Financial Times column): 

“A few decades ago, the theory would have better matched the evidence. Back then, growth in GDP per capita still tended to be accompanied by growth in pollution and larger material footprints. But that link has long since decoupled in a growing roster of countries and pollution levels are now falling worldwide. In many cases economic growth now reduces each person’s environmental impact. Much of this results from hard-won regulation, hand-in-hand with growth. The solar and batteries revolution – central to decoupling energy from emissions – is now powering millions in poor countries and has also made fortunes in richer ones: a case of growth and wealth creation alongside huge positive externalities for people and planet.” 

This passage packs several points. Let me take them one at a time, starting with one that is consensually false. “Pollution levels are now falling worldwide.” There are countless ways to show that isn’t true, but here is perhaps the cleanest: the 2025 Planetary Health Check from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research reports that “seven out of nine Planetary Boundaries have been breached, with all of those seven showing trends of increasing pressure – suggesting further deterioration and destabilization of planetary health in the near future” (p. 11). In the journal Nature, Fanning and Raworth (2025) track 13 indicators across the same nine planetary boundaries to find that “the median level of overshoot increased from 75% in 2000 to 96% in 2022.” The planet is getting worse. This is a well-established scientific fact and disputing it without evidence is, frankly, suspicious. 

The “growing roster of countries” links to Hannah Ritchie’s 2021 Our World in Data piece and its graph of 30 countries that grew GDP while cutting CO₂ between 2005 and 2020. I’ve explained at length why that chart shows far less than it claims (see A response to Paul Krugman, Chapter 2 of Slow down or die, and also A response to Hannah Ritchie). In short: it only includes one environmental factor, covers a short period of time without correcting for recessions, and, most importantly, the reductions it celebrates are an order of magnitude too slow to meet climate targets (see, for example, Vogel and Hickel, 2023). A country can sit proudly on that list and still be failing every test that matters for environmental sustainability.

The opening line (“back then”) points to a 2026 preprint (a not yet peer reviewed academic article) titled “Developed economies are growing while reducing many of their environmental impacts.” The empirical study tracks GDP against nine environmental indicators from 1960 to 2023. Here is the first problem: of the two things Burn-Murdoch singles out as decoupled (“pollution” and “material footprints”), material footprint is one that the paper explicitly says has not decoupled. In the authors’ own words: “We do not see clear evidence of absolute decoupling for energy and agricultural nitrogen use, nor for material footprint, though growth in these pressures was very slow, if present, for the past decade in high-income countries” (p. 3). Very slow growth is not decoupling; it is, at best, a plateau at a catastrophic level (in these countries, material footprint currently sits at roughly 24 tonnes per person, which the authors note “far exceeds a recommended sustainable range of 8-14 metric tons per person annually,” p. 7). The only moment this indicator actually decreased was a “brief, sharp decline in 2008-2009 coinciding with the U.S. housing market bubble correction and global financial crisis” (p. 3), which is closer to a recession than to green growth. 

What about the rest? In fairness, the paper does report that five of its nine indicators declined in absolute terms in high-income countries: phosphorus, agricultural land, carbon dioxide (CO₂), sulphur dioxide (SO₂), and fisheries catch. That sounds like a win for green growth, until you look behind each number. Agricultural land declined, but “this apparent absolute decoupling masks externalization of some land-intensive production to upper- and lower-middle income exporters” (p. 3). The land didn’t disappear, it just moved to China, Brazil, Argentina, and Southeast Asia. 

Fisheries catch fell by over 40% between the mid-1980s and 2022, not because rich nations fish more sustainably, but because the wild fish are largely gone. The authors are explicit: “our results reflect decoupling from wild catch more than decoupling from fish consumption” (p. 7), with farmed production having overtaken wild catch globally in 2022.

Phosphorus declined, but the authors attribute it mainly to legacy phosphorus already accumulated in soils, reducing the need for new applications, alongside the rising costs of fertilizer (and again, there is the issue of scale: global phosphorus application is about 18 Tg P/year, which is three times the safe threshold set by the planetary boundaries framework).

CO₂ is decoupling for the high-income group as a whole, but “approximatively 43 % (21 out of 45) of countries within this group do not meet the absolute decoupling criteria” (p. 5). And in the countries where emissions decline, the cuts are minimal: high-income CO₂ fell by roughly 0.8% per year over the past decade, while “projected pathways limiting 2100 warming to 1.5°C require global emissions to be reduced ten times faster” (p. 7).^[1] If global emissions must fall ten times faster than the high-income group is currently managing, then on any equity-based sharing of the remaining carbon budget, those countries who today emit far above the world average would have to cut faster still. 

Biodiversity (measured as vertebrate loss) is still rising in absolute terms. The one place the paper finds “absolute decoupling” for it is Latin America, where, in the authors’ own words, “this apparent ‘decoupling’ is caused by having fewer animals left to lose, rather than population recovery” (p. 2). That may be the most depressing evidence for decoupling: growth stops causing biodiversity loss because all the biodiversity has already been lost. Not sure we can call that green growth. 

That leaves one genuinely clean success: sulphur dioxide. SO₂ emissions have fallen across the world since the 1970s, and the decline is real and worth having (SO₂ attacks the human respiratory system and cutting it was a public-health achievement). But the authors explain precisely why it wasn’t difficult to achieve: “the decoupling of SO₂ emissions from GDP was attributed to the passage of easily enforceable pollution regulations combined with the deployment of relatively cheap filtration technologies” (p. 7). So, easily enforceable rules and cheap end-of-pipe filters, something that can hardly be generalised to all environmental issues. Resting the case for green growth on SO₂ would be like an alcoholic claiming sobriety because he’s cut back on mouthwash – technically, a reduction, but not the problem anyone’s actually worried about.  

So, what do the paper’s own authors conclude? Their results “offer mixed support for the green growth hypothesis. […] For advocates of green growth, our findings pose critical questions about feasibility and pace” (p. 8). That is a hedged, heavily caveated paper that Burn-Murdoch has overblown into “the link has long since decoupled” and “pollution levels are now falling worldwide.” He’s not reporting a finding, he’s laundering one.

He doesn’t stop there. “Much of this results from hard-won regulation, hand-in-hand with growth.” Regulation, yes. Hand-in-hand with growth, no – and, again, the evidence runs the other way. In a scientific article published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers have tracked global emissions from 1820 to 2022, finding that 60% of cumulative fossil-fuel CO₂ reductions over two centuries occurred during recessions, with just five global crises accounting for roughly 40%. We already knew this from Le Quéré et al. (2019), who studied the 18 fastest-decarbonising countries over 2005–2015 and found reductions in energy use “explained at least in part by the lower growth in GDP” (p. 215). Policy mattered, they concluded, but its “effect is hidden by the effect of GDP growth on energy demand” (p. 216). I’m not saying regulations don’t matter – of course they do. What’s dishonest is bundling them with growth when the clearest cuts on record coincide with growth slowing or reversing, which, if anything, strengthens the case for degrowth. 

This is the strangest line of the paragraph: “In many cases economic growth now reduces each person’s environmentalimpact.” Read charitably, it’s a statement about correlation: as GDP per capita rises, per-capita impact tends to fall (that’s the decoupling claim I’ve just debunked). Read literally – that producing more actively reduces impact – it tips into nonsense. The only economy in which making more stuff lowers your footprint is one staffed entirely with animal caretakers, environmental consultants, and climate activists, all running on sunlight and good intentions. 

Claim n°2: Poverty eradication

Same playbook, different zombie theory. Having dealt with the environment, John Burn-Murdoch moves on to poverty, trying to show that economic growth is the key to eradicating it:  

“Other assertions are more straightforwardly flawed, namely that growth is no longer accompanied by reductions in poverty. […]. The tight link between growth in GDP per capita and reduction in poverty is one of the most remarkable findings in economic research — and it has held firm across every global region for more than two centuries. Researchers have long interrogated whether total national income growth is matched by growth in incomes for the poorest, consistently finding that it is, across a range of countries, time periods and policy environments. When I updated these analyses to include the past 15 years, I found that this link between aggregate and bottom-fifth outcomes has become even stronger. Where incomes for the poorest have stagnated, it is generally because the economy didn’t grow (see the UK of late), not because growth was shared unequally.”

The two hyperlinks on “interrogated” and “consistently finding” point to David Dollar and Aart Kraay’s “Growth is Good for the Poor” (a World Bank working paper from 2001) and its sequel, “Growth still is good for the poor” (Dollar, Kleineberg and Kraay, a 2016 academic article published in the European Economic Review). Burn-Murdoch presents them as proof of a “tight link between growth and reduction in poverty.” The trouble is that’s not what either paper measures.  

What Dollar and Kraay actually test is the relationship between the income of the poorest fifth and average income. Their headline result is that “changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are uncorrelated with changes in average income” (p. 68). This means that the poorest fifth’s slice of national income stays roughly constant as the whole economy grows, their incomes rising more or less in step with the average. That is a finding about distribution-neutrality showing that economic growth, on average, neither helps nor hurts the poor’s relative position, but it’s no proof that growth actually reduces poverty, and certainly not that growth is the best or only way to do so.^[2]

The “held firm across every global region for more than two centuries” line links to another piece from Our World in Data.^[3] That two-century triumph rests almost entirely on the extreme-poverty headcount using the dollar-a-day line and its successors. Move the threshold up just a little and the miracle disappears. As the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights documents in his 2026 Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, at USD 8.30 per day roughly 3.7 billion people remain deprived, and the absolute number below that line has barely changed in three decades, because population growth has offset the falling rate (para. 29 p. 17). 

Between 1990 and 2001, only $0.60 out of every additional $100 in global income per capita improved the situation of people living under $1 per day (Woodward and Simms, 2006). Between 1999 and 2010, $111 of additional growth in global GDP was needed to achieve a $1 reduction in poverty (Woodward, 2015). The pattern repeated the following decade: between 2010 and 2020, only 1% of the increase in world spending reached the extremely poor (Kharas, 2020). When growth is captured overwhelmingly by people who are already rich, it does little for the poor, and that’s exactly the situation we’re in. Today, the richest 10% of humanity (556 million people) own 75% of all wealth and receive 53% of all income, while the poorest half (2.2 billion people) own 2% of wealth and take 8% of income. 

And even for the poverty reduction that did happen, was it because of growth? The honest answer from the literature is that it’s neither sufficient nor necessary. On sufficiency, the Roadmap’s verdict is blunt: growth is “neither sufficient nor automatically pro-poor,” its effects depend on labour-market institutions, bargaining power, and whether the gains accrue to labour or capital (para. 50 p. 29), a point I return to below. The old transmission belt – growth creates jobs which make poverty vanish – is not as automatic as one would think. In fact, since 2012 the correlation between GDP increases and falling unemployment across the OECD has been a feeble 0.34, with “jobless growth” becoming the rule rather than the exception (para. 52 p. 30). 

On necessity, the case is even weaker, because poverty has been reduced without waiting for growth. Kerala reached the lowest infant mortality in India despite decades of relative poverty; Thailand’s universal health coverage sharply cut health-driven impoverishment; Rwanda roughly doubled life expectancy through community-based health insurance (these three examples are given in the Roadmap, para. 222 p. 115). Survival, health, security, and many other concrete human needs can be met in many ways, some of them far less GDP-intensive than others. The resources to generalise wellbeing already exist: one study cited in the Roadmap (Hickel and Sullivan, 2024) finds that it’s possible to provide decent living standards for a projected 8.5 billion people at around 30% of current global resource and energy use (para. 214 p. 110). 

In much of the world, poverty is not a production problem but one of distribution. Recent changes in poverty headcount are carried overwhelmingly by China. And indeed, looking at the World Bank’s $1.90-a-day line, extreme poverty in China went from 88% in 1981 to zero by 2018. However, tracking people’s ability to access essential goods and services, regardless of whether they’re monetised, Sullivan et al. (2023) find that the Chinese poverty rate averaged 5.6% in the 1980s, far below capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time (51% in India, 36% in Indonesia, 29% in Brazil), before soaring during the market reforms of the 1990s. As privatisation inflated the price of essentials while deflating working-class wages, poverty climbed to 68% in 1995. 

In another article from 2023 (“Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century”), the same authors generalise the finding, challenging the standard view that capitalism and growth are poverty eradicators. The authors’ evidence says otherwise: “the rise of capitalism caused a dramatic deterioration of human welfare. In all regions studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.” As in the Chinese case, and in line with the conclusions of the UN Roadmap, what eradicates poverty is not GDP growth but progressive social movements and public policies that actually render resources more accessible to those who need it the most.  

The “I updated these analyses [which supposedly makes the case] even stronger” does strengthen the original claim, but only the one actually made by Dollar and Kraay (2001) and Dollar et al. (2016), which, as shown above, is a proof of distribution-neutrality, not of poverty eradication, and certainly not of growth necessity. As for the UK, the British poor didn’t stagnate in a politically neutral vacuum where growth simply failed to show up; they stagnated through more than a decade of deliberate austerity, in which the means of meeting basic needs became less accessible. “The economy didn’t grow” does a lot to obscure the fact that the public provisioning system was dismantled. The UK isn’t a case of an economy with a general deficit of wealth, it’s a case study in how a state can immiserate its poorest by unwise choices of allocation, motivated by an invalid theory. 

Claim n°3: Wage stagnation 

Two claims done, three to go. The third concerns not poverty but inequality:

“Other assertions are more straightforwardly flawed […] that it has not led to shared prosperity, and that wages have stagnated despite national incomes expanding. The argument that stagnant wages in rich countries have decoupled from soaring economic output also often rests on shaky analysis. On both sides of the Atlantic, comparing like with like, workers’ output and compensation have kept moving in virtual lockstep.”

The “comparing like with like” points to a 27-page American Enterprise Institute^[4] report, “Understanding trends in worker pay over past 50 years” (2024), authored by AEI senior fellow Scott Winship. Winship’s point is that pay has kept up with productivity: between 1948 and 2022, productivity increased by a factor of 4.1 and hourly compensation by a factor of 3.9 (Fig. 4, p. 8). But the same paper also argues that something changed in the 1970s, after which “the compensation of the median worker has lagged overall productivity significantly” (p. 10, italics in original). 

Focusing on averages is a well-worn trick for hiding inequality. If a billionaire walks into a room, average wealth soars, which gives an illusion of improvement, even though nobody actually got richer. If a billionaire walks into a room, median wealth stays the same, which is a more accurate depiction of real changes in wealth levels within the room. While productivity rose by 111 % between 1973 and 2022, median hourly compensation rose by only 50 % (Fig. 7, p. 10), which means that the median worker only captured under half of productivity gains. That’s a long way from the “virtual lockstep” announced in the FT column.  

The “both sides” directs to Pessoa and Van Reenen’s “Decoupling of Wage Growth and Productivity Growth? Myth and Reality,” a 2013 discussion paper from the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE.^[5] Again, the authors separate average from median wages because they behave differently – average stays coupled to growth while median decouples from it. So, the honest rewrite of Burn-Murdoch’s sentence isn’t “output and compensation have kept moving in virtual lockstep.” It is: average compensation has roughly tracked average productivity, while the typical worker’s pay has lagged well behind – and the gap is a matter of distribution, not decoupling.  

Wage inequality is only the tip of the iceberg. A fuller measure of “shared prosperity” has to include income and wealth – and once it does, the argument collapses. A glance at the World Inequality Database shows how unequal UK growth has actually been. National income grew an average of 1.7% a year between the 1980s and 2024, from £18,139 in 1980 to £38,181 in 2024. Same pattern for wealth: from £73,274 in 1980 to £168,211 in 2024 (a 1.9% yearly growth rate). But these are averages. In the 1980s, the British richest 10% owned 52% of national wealth and received 28% of national income, and, in 2024, they own 57% of wealth and capture 36% of income. In the 1980s, the richest 10% owned about 20-25 times as much as the poorest half of the country, a ratio that rose to 61 in 2024. Calling that “shared prosperity” is a stretch. 

Growth has not lifted all boats, whatever the Financial Times would like readers to believe. When we remove the selective interpretation of the studies, what’s left is exactly what degrowth economists have been saying all along: an economy that grew unsustainably, for the benefit of a minority of already-rich individuals. In such situation, arguing for more growth in the name of “shared prosperity” is either dishonnest or naïve. 

Claim n°4: Happy growth

Claim four concerns growth and wellbeing. Here, the columnist mobilises four references and, as usual, asks each of them to carry more than it can bear. 

“And earlier this year new research pushed back on the argument that once a country becomes rich enough, further economic growth doesn’t boost wellbeing. After adjusting for the way people change their frame of reference over time, focusing instead on whether they say they are doing better than in the past, the research found life satisfaction continued to climb alongside GDP per capita even in countries as rich as the US. Moving away from individual material wellbeing to broader societal measures, research finds that economic growth fosters trust in government and prosperity boosts social cohesion. Indeed, the past decade of political turmoil in Britain has coincided not with rising inequality (it has been falling) but with anaemic growth.” 

Let’s begin with his centrepiece proof, the “new research” that supposedly shows that “life satisfaction continued to climb alongside GDP per capita even in countries as rich as the US.” Both hyperlinks point to the same paper: Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik, “Is it possible to raise national happiness?” (Journal of Public Economics, 2026). It is a careful, honest work, but it doesn’t say what Burn-Murdoch claims it does. Actually, the authors themselves caution against that precise reading: “we should probably not conclude that national happiness in the USA more than doubled in the second half of the 20th century. Yet, for a similar reason, we should also probably not trust that national happiness in the USA has been flat. The truth is likely to be in the middle” (p. 16). The journalist has taken a paper whose punchline is “the truth is likely to be in the middle” and reported the top of the range as the finding.

There is also a scope problem. “Even in countries as rich as the US” implies a general result holding across rich nations, but the paper only looks at data from the US between 1959 and 2008, and the time period closes precisely where it gets inconvenient. As the authors themselves note: “the period covered by the data ends in 2008 […] and it may not capture the recent deterioration in the mental health of Americans” (p. 10). A study of the US that stops in 2008 cannot stand as evidence that growth boosts wellbeing in every rich country, always.  

The Prati and Senik (2026) article raises interesting questions about measurements but it offers no tangible proof that growth makes people happier. The question it asks is whether the famous flatness of reported life satisfaction reflects a real hedonic treadmill (people genuinely don’t get happier) or a mere “rescaling” (people raise the bar for what 10 out of 10 means). The authors are explicit that they have not settled this: “We do not claim to have demonstrated that rescaling, rather than the hedonic treadmill, is the actual process that explains the relative inertia of reported happiness” (p. 16). And the mechanism they propose, far from rescuing growth, it’s much closer to Easterlin’s original hypothesis: the reason Americans report “7/10” decade after decade is that the “best possible life” benchmark keeps moving up with affluence, so that “7/10 […] had a very different meaning in 2008 than it did 50 years earlier” (p. 10). People don’t become harder to satisfy, they become “tougher in their grading style” (p. 2).  

The second reference (“research finds that economic growth fosters trust in government”) is Timothy Besley, Christopher Dann and Sacha Dray’s “Growth Experiences and Trust in Government” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2026). Bringing together data from several opinion surveys, the paper shows that across 166 countries, “people who have experienced higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments.”And yet, this paper contradicts the second part of Burn-Murdoch’s sentence, the part stating that “prosperity boosts social cohesion.” Indeed, Besley et al. (2026) report that growth experiences have “no statistical impact found for nonstate institutions […] nor on interpersonal trust” (p. 1766). Interpersonal trust is the standard empirical proxy for social cohesion, and on that measure growth does precisely nothing in this specific paper. 

The reference attached to “prosperity boosts social cohesion” is a 2018 paper published in Comparative Sociologytitled “Social Cohesion and Its Correlates: A Comparison of Western and Asian Societies.” It does find that “economic prosperity” (which they proxy with GDP) is one of the few “universal” correlates of cohesion (p. 449), but that’s a statement about levels of prosperity, not about growth, and certainly not about whether more growth in an already-rich society improves cohesion. The paper’s own data show that there is no iron law here: South Korea ranks fourth in GDP but only scores average on cohesion, behind the much poorer, far more cohesive Bhutan and Laos (p. 445). 

“The past decade of political turmoil in Britain has coincided not with rising inequality (it has been falling) but with anaemic growth.” The link here is not, as one might assume for such a grand statement, a data source or an academic paper; it is an opinion column by Tim Harford (“UK inequality is getting worse, right? But what if it isn’t?,” July 2024), itself a plea for growth over redistribution.^[6] It’s a common trick that most readers miss: one opinion piece citing another, each lending the other a false air of scientific solidity.  

Harford’s piece is anything but solid. His claim rests on a single metric (the World Inequality Database’s top-1% income share). He argues that “in the UK, the share of income flowing to the richest 1 per cent is lower than it was during the financial crisis. It is much the same in the most recent numbers as it was in 1997.” Checking the numbers, the share went from 6.8% in 1980 to 12.1% in 1997, peaked at 14.7% in 2007, and landed at 13.1% in 2024, the latest year with available data. That’s a classic trick: pick the peak year (2007) and note that today’s level is lower, implying that inequality is falling. Start from the lowest point instead (6.7% in 1976) and you get the opposite conclusion: inequality has risen. 

Harford himself spends a good half of his column acknowledging that there are forms of inequality that have not been captured by this indicator. Wealth inequality, for instance, hasn’t fallen at all, it actually increased, regardless of which start year you choose. In 1976, the top 10% wealthiest Brits owned 39 times more than the bottom half of the population. That ratio climbed up to 45 in 2007 and to 61 in 2024. Pointing to one income-inequality indicator to argue inequality isn’t worsening is unconvincing – it’s a bit like measuring the width of your shadow as proof your diet worked. 

Claim n°5: There is no case for degrowth

Here is the final move. Having claimed that growth reduces environmental harms (Claim 1), lifts the poor out of poverty (Claim 2), ensures shared prosperity for everyone (Claim 3), and improves overall wellbeing (Claim 4), John Burn-Murdoch closes with a warning against degrowth.  

“where growth slows – whether through demographic decline, policy missteps or explicit degrowth agendas – living standards will stagnate (including for the poorest), reducing public support for altruism and pushing us towards a zero-sum world with increased inter-group tensions and more hoarding of scarce resources. Economic growth isn’t everything for everyone, but it turns out it’s pretty close. It has delivered remarkable progress on exactly the benchmarks that its critics prioritise – recently even on environmental impact. The problem facing rich and poor alike today is that we don’t have enough of it, not that we’ve had too much.” 

Let’s start by noting that the phrase “whether through demographic decline, policy missteps or explicit degrowth agendas,” bundles three entirely different things under one heading, as if a collapsing birth rate, a central-bank blunder and a deliberate downscaling of activities would have the same impact. 

Obviously, they would not. When speaking of “reducing public support for altruism,” the journalist cites a 2016 study in World Development (“Public Opinion and Foreign Aid Cuts in Economic Crises”). The title is indicative enough: it’s a study about foreign aid during recessions. Its finding is that voters deprioritise aid during economic downturns, even when there are no specific budgetary constraints. Let’s say it again: degrowth is not a recession (otherwise there would be no need to coin a new concept). A planned, equitable degrowth would defuse that perceived fear of scarcity the study identifies as the real driver of self-interest. If anything, this paper is an argument for managing the end of growth carefully, rather than the current strategy, which leaves rich societies to lurch through repeated involuntary crises.

“Demographic decline” links to another FT piece arguing that it’s a “drag on growth in productivity and living standards” because an ageing population “shrinks the workforce.” But this is a problem only if you are committed to growing aggregate GDP in the first place. A shrinking workforce is a crisis for a system that measures success by total output and therefore needs an ever-larger labour force. From a post-growth perspective, one organised around inclusion and wellbeing, a gently declining population is not the end of the world. If anything, it makes it easier to reconcile an economy’s macroecological footprint with its planetary boundaries. 

“Zero-sum world” and “increased inter-group tensions” hyperlink to two columns from Burn-Murdoch, and both rest on the same underlying study: Chinoy, Nunn, Sequeira and Stantcheva’s “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences” (American Economic Review, 2026). This paper measures “zero-sum thinking,” a psychological and cultural trait, defined in the study as the belief “that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others.” That’s a study of a psychological mindset, not a finding about whether the world actually is zero-sum. Degrowth does not argue that we should believethat we live in a zero-sum world. It argues that we do. It’s a biophysical claim grounded in science, that material and energy throughput cannot expand forever on a finite planet, especially one where planetary boundaries are already under heavy strain. 

And, even on the discourse itself, it’s not clear why zero-sum thinking is so problematic. In “Are we destined for a zero-sum future?” Burn-Murdoch himself concedes that a zero-sum mindset is “not in itself clearly a good or bad thing, morally speaking,” that “no one is arguing that this shift in mindset is not justified,” and that if societies become “more concerned with fairness, that is no bad thing.” So, the doom-laden phrasing of the final paragraph – zero-sum thinking as the road to some kind of Walking Dead hoarding and inter-group hatred – is contradicted by the author’s own hedges three weeks earlier. He warns us against the very thing he elsewhere admits is rational and possibly good.

To support the sweeping claim that growth is “pretty close” to being “everything for everyone”, the journalist cites aSubstack post from March 2026 by retired World Bank economist Lant Pritchett, where Pritchett introduces an unpublished, revised paper titled “Economic growth is enough and only economic growth is enough” (italics in original). Again, a quick look is enough to realise it provides limited evidence for what Burn-Murdoch wants to say. Figure 1 (p. 13) is a textbook saturation curve: beyond a certain GDP-per-capita threshold, growth loses its correlation with wellbeing entirely. Or, in the paper’s own dense phrasing: “The results show that the elasticity tends to start at a moderate level, then rise with GDPPC, reaching a peak in Quintile II, fall modestly but remains high in Quintile III, and then falls to a much lower level by the average GDPPC in Quintile IV, P$27,010.” (Please, if you’re a scholar, spare your readers and read Deirdre McCloskey’s Economical Writing: Thirty-five rules for clear and persuasive prose.)  

Pritchett’s own curve says exactly what growth-critical economists have long argued: rich countries have already saturated the things that matter, and squeezing more GDP out of them barely moves the needle on human wellbeing. “You might like having a red car more than a blue car but if you don’t have a car, its color is hypothetical,” Pritchett writes. Degrowth is a prescription for the countries with the car, the SUV, the second SUV in the driveway, and the advertising, insurance, repairing, highways, and parking lots that comes with them. Citing a poor-country growth argument to rebut a rich-country sufficiency argument is a category error, one that has been debunked many times over (see, e.g., Hickel, 2020). The entire point of the “contraction and convergence” strategy explored by the Global Justice Project is to make ecological room for needs satisfaction in the countries where growth will actually help. 

The closing claim – that the problem “facing rich and poor alike […] is that we don’t have enough of it” – is absurd. For the poorest, the binding constraint is not the size of the world economy, it is its distribution  and the ecological space left for them (see, for example, Unequal uses of the Earth). Every symptom Burn-Murdoch lists – a frightened, low-trust, hoarding, zero-sum society – is a distributional failure dressed up as an argument for more growth. Almost every problem the column raises – stalled mobility, stagnant median wages, intergenerational rent transfers, fraying trust, the AI-driven tilt toward capital – is a problem of distribution, not of growth. 

On a finite planet, where seven out of nine planetary boundaries have been breached, you cannot answer a distributional crisis by simply growing the economy further. If claim n°1 about decoupling is false (and I’ve shown that it is), then further growth in already-rich economies is unsustainable, regardless of what social good you hope it will deliver. The zero-sum panic isn’t an argument against degrowth. Read honestly, it is the single strongest argument for taking degrowth seriously.

Conclusion

Across all five claims, the pattern repeats: Burn-Murdoch reaches for a congenial source, drops its caveats, and presents his selective interpretation as settled science. Coming from the Financial Times’s chief data reporter, that’s genuinely concerning. These cheap-shot tribunes, which bundle a handful of hyperlinks into a bombastic claim, are dangerously close to misinformation. What worries me is that some readers will take this at face value. A column like this takes minutes to read, hours to write, but days to fact-check against the literature. I’m aware that this is a losing battle for scientists, who will always run out of time first. My hope is that this debunking sharpens readers’ critical instincts and helps them see that a handful of old papers and posts, dressed up with one’s own columns, cannot overturn the well-documented findings of an entire field. Looked at fairly, this isn’t even a real attack – it’s a mosquito on the back of an elephant. 

Notes 

^[1] The column mentions a technology that is supposedly “central to decoupling energy from emissions.” The hyperlink points to a Bloomberg profile of a Chinese battery billionaire. Little technical reminder: solar energy and batteries make electricity, and electricity is only about 20% of global final energy consumption. The other 80% is liquid fuels for transport, heat for industry, and the like, where solar barely reaches. Worse, even within that 20% slice, the “revolution” is only now, and only barely, beginning to substitute for fossil fuels rather than add to them – for most of industrial history, new energy sources have piled on top of the old rather than replacing them (see More and More and More). 

^[2] It gets worse for the journalist, because the authors he cites went out of their way to disclaim exactly the reading he gives them. Dollar and Kraay are explicit: “This is not to say that growth is all that is needed to improve the lives of the poor” (p. 9). They also note that the “pro-poor growth” agenda amounts to “a call for some other policy interventions that raise the share of income captured by the poorest,” and that, search as they might, they were “unable to uncover any systematic evidence” that the usual policies do so (p. 3). In other words: the paper sold here as evidence that growth lifts the poor concludes that we don’t know how to make growth do anything special for them. And here is the detail that should have ended the paragraph before it even began. Dollar and Kraay deliberately refuse to use a poverty line. They define “the poor” as the bottom 20% and 40% rather than people below a fixed threshold, and they explain why in a footnote: with a real poverty line, the relationship gets messy, and they concede that on that measure “incomes of the poor […] rise less than proportionately with average incomes” (p. 12, fn. 7). So the canonical reference for “growth reduces poverty” quietly sidesteps measuring poverty-below-a-line, precisely because the result is weaker once you do. 

^[3] In the Our World in Data piece, its author Max Roser estimates that “the world economy needs to increase five-fold for global poverty [using a $30 poverty line] to substantially decline” (for a critique of this approach, see Hickel and Sullivan, 2024, pp. 4-5). In the Global Justice Project, Thomas Piketty and his colleagues also assume a large increase by a factor of 3.5 of world GDP. The difference is that, contrary to John Burn-Murdoch, they’re advocating for a convergence scenario with degrowth in very rich countries, quasi-stagnation for rich countries, and growth for all the others who have not yet reached the GDP target (for more, see A response to the WIL, 2026). 

^[4] Note that the American Enterprise Institute is a free-market think tank. Basically, its raison d’être is to make the case for what John Burn-Murdoch argues, which should be enough to raise suspicion. Relying on them for proof that growth is good would be like quoting a report from Philip Morris to argue that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. 

^[5] Fun fact: John Van Reenen’s book The Economics of Creative Destruction (co-written with Ufuk Akcigit) includes a foreword written by the French president Emmanuel Macron, which lays out a passionate defence of economic growth and capitalism: “Creative destruction is the vital energy of the ‘spirited horse’ of capitalism. If we know how to tame it and steer its path, then it is possible to reconnect with shared prosperity while protecting our common goods. […] it [talking about the book] reinstates a growth objective. We have given in too much to defeatism, by taking growth as exogenous and lamenting its slowdown. If we believe in creative destruction, we know we can influence the rate of growth, through more work and more innovation” (p. xii). 

^[6] Here is Tim Harford making a plea for growth in the Financial Times: “If income inequality has fallen, and taxes have become more redistributive, then what is the problem? The answer: slow growth. Broadly-based economic growth supplies the funding for public services and benefits, while easing people’s concerns about affording the essentials of life. The UK’s problem is not that economic growth has been too narrow, but that it has barely happened at all. What we have had is broadly-based stagnation. […] There is a paradox here: the weaker growth becomes, the more people focus on inequality, fighting over the pie rather than finding ways to make the pie grow. This new government is right to emphasise the need for growth rather than redistribution.”

The paper is available as a PDF here.

On June 4^th, the World Inequality Lab launched the Global Justice Project. The outcome is a 136-page report (“A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries”) coordinated by a team of seven researchers (Lucas Chancel, Jonas Dietrich, Cornelia Mohren, Rowaida Moshrif, Moritz Odersky, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi). The document presents the results of a modelling exercise exploring global transition scenarios for social justice and environmental sustainability.^[1] The launch benefited from wide coverage in the media and I’ve heard it’ll lead to the publication of a book in the Fall.^[2] The attention is well-deserved for this is an outstanding piece of scholarship. As its lead author Lucas Chancel explains: “24 months of work, 45 researchers from all over the world, combining insights from economics, history and climate science.” The outcome is colossal and the level of ambition revolutionary. 

And this is why I’m writing a response. I want to offer a constructive critique based on my particular expertise (ecological economics and growth-critical theories), pointing to a few areas for improvement. My hope is that these humble remarks will help this report to be as powerful as it can be at a moment where we urgently need more ideas like these. My contribution is quite niche and narrow. There are three points I want to make. First, I want to challenge their definitions of sufficiency and degrowth, showing that their usage of the terms could be better articulated. Second, I want to show that their “uniform degrowth” scenario is not exactly what it claims to be. And finally, I want to raise several doubts concerning the biophysical viability of the Sustainable Convergence scenario. 

Green growth, degrowth, or sufficiency? 

 “The Global Justice Report,” the authors write (p. 27), “provides a transparent framework for engaging in debates around ‘green growth’, ‘degrowth’, and ‘sufficiency’ […] it allows these debates to be grounded in concrete quantitative scenario analysis.” That’s a welcome effort, especially concerning degrowth and sufficiency, since most of this literature remains conceptual. Yet, turning these complex ideas into computable numbers is a perilous exercise. What I hope to show is that the authors have taken certain liberties with these terms which are at odds with established scholarly usage, including in peer-reviewed publications. To strengthen the theoretical rigour of the report, I will propose a more adequate conceptual mapping of these different concepts.  

Sufficiency and eco-efficiency

The term “sufficiency” has been used in a variety of ways.^[3] Following an older tradition (e.g., the German Suffizienz introduced by Wolfgang Sachs in the 1990s), the work by Princen (2005) popularised the “logic of sufficiency” as an organising principle aiming at enoughness, the sweet spot between not enough (minimum) and too much (maximum). Today, one finds this min-max approach in concepts like Ingrid Robeyns’s “limitarianism,” Doris Fuchs and colleagues’ contribution of “consumption corridors” now supplemented by Bärnthaler and Gough’s “production corridors,” or most famously in Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economics.” 

In theories of justice, the minimum dimension of sufficiency is termed “sufficientarianism” (e.g., Shields, 2020). In a famous text from 1987, the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt summarised this position as follows: “what is important from the point of morality is not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough.” Today, this perspective is explored in the literature pioneered by Narasimha Rao and Jihoon Min on “decent living standards,” where researchers measure the ecological footprint of a basket of goods and services considered essential for the satisfaction of human needs (e.g., Millward-Hopkins et al., 2020; Kikstra et al., 2021; Vélez-Henao and Pauliuk, 2023; Kromand et al., 2025). This enables scholars to estimate how many people do not have enough (poverty defined as a state of insufficiency). For instance, Fanning and Raworth (2025) uses 22 indicators across 12 dimensions to show that the median level of social shortfall in the world has gone from 47% in 2000 to 35% in 2022. The decent living standards concept of Rao and Min (2018) and the literature that builds on it rests on theories of needs such as Max-Neef (1991) and Doyal & Gough (1991), which hold that fundamental human needs are universal, finite and satiable, even if the “satisfiers” that meet them can vary across time and cultures. Ecological economists study the biophysical prerequisites in order to live well, paying specific attention to economic systems that manage to deliver high wellbeing with low ecological footprints (for a good description of this approach, see Brand-Correa and Steinberger, 2017).

While decent living standards look at sufficiency as a minimum (having enough), other streams of research treat sufficiency as a maximum (not having too much). Often, this starts from estimates of ecological overshoot using the planetary boundaries framework (a good example of this approach is Lalieu et al., 2024 for Belgium). If a country’s macro-ecological footprint is unsustainable, sufficiency becomes an imperative of reduction (sometimes termed “ecological sufficiency” or “eco-sufficiency”). When interpreted as such, “sufficiency” is often considered a rival to “efficiency” (or more specifically, to “eco-efficiency”).^[4] If any environmental impact can be written as a level of activity times the impact per unit of activity, efficiency acts on the second term, lowering the impact intensity of each unit while sufficiency works on the first, lowering the quantity of activity itself.

One could say that sufficiency aims at less while efficiency aims for leaner. For example, Krpan et al. (2025, supplementary materials, p. 4) define sufficiency as “reducing non-essential forms of production and sharing resources more equitably,” which the authors contrast to efficiency (“wasting less materials and energy in the process of production through technological innovation”). In the German Avoid-Shift-Improve (ASI) framework, originally used for studying transport systems, efficiency is concerned with improve (e.g., more fuel-efficient engines) and sufficiency with avoid (e.g., smaller distances travelled), while a third category of “consistency” is assigned to the shift stage (e.g., modal shift from car to bike). 

Although most definitions of sufficiency emphasise demand and consumption, the concept can also be applied to supply and production. A government deciding to close down a national flight route (supply) or the generalisation of a ‘flight shame’ culture among travellers (demand) both lead to a reduction in flights. Both these sufficiency strategies can be contrasted to an eco-efficiency approach, which would consist, for example, in developing less-polluting fuels. Historically, the sufficiency literature emerged as a critique of strategies relying solely on efficiency. Indeed, efficiency gains tend to be partly or wholly cancelled by growth in production/consumption (the so-called “rebound effect”), which means that improving the ecological productivity of an economy is no guarantee of reducing its actual footprint – hence the need for sufficiency. 

A popular definition is the one in the IPCC AR6, which was originally proposed by Yamina Saheb, the lead of the World Sufficiency Lab. Sufficiency is “a set of policy measures and daily practices which avoid the demand for energy, materials, land, water, and other natural resources, while delivering wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries.”^[5] The first part of the sentence emphasises sufficiency as reduction while the second part stresses the ideas of minimum floors and maximum ceilings. The phrase “wellbeing for all within planetary boundaries” is particularly powerful since it implies that, in an ecologically constrained world, the too-much of a minority of affluent people quickly becomes the not-enough of everyone else down the line (for more on environmental justice, see Parrique, 2025). It is the finitude of ecological budgets that connects the floors and the ceilings, making them two ends of a single fair-share constraint, leading to the idea of a “safe and just space for humanity” (the title of the 2012 working paper where Kate Raworth first presented the doughnut).

The concept of sufficiency has both individual and structural implications. At the personal level, it echoes notions of minimalism, downshifting, voluntary simplicity, the simpler life, and other philosophies of less-is-more with a panoply of lifestyle implications ranging from slower mobility, car-sharing, plant-based diets, reduced work hours, and shared living space (that’s the “daily practices” in Saheb’s definition) – for a typology of consumption changes, see Sandberg (2021). It might be worth clarifying that sufficiency is not asceticism or austerity because it is bounded by decent living standards; its aim is enough for a flourishing life, not the minimisation of production and consumption for its own sake.

But sufficiency also implies structural changes (the “policy measures” in the definition). This is what Schneidewind and Zahrnt (2014) call a “politics of sufficiency,” referring to a mix of policies that remove the barriers to the daily practices of sufficiency (the subtitle of the book is: “making it easier to live the good life”). The most systematic inventory to date is the European Sufficiency Policy Database, which compiles and categorises close to 300 measures, from speed limits, frequent-flyer levies, and bans on short-haul flights, to progressive taxation of per-capita living space and incentives for cooperative housing, to restrictions on advertising for carbon-intensive products and plant-based menus in schools. A key lesson of this line of research is that the agenda of sufficiency goes beyond changing ‘consumer behaviour’ and includes a comprehensive mix of institutional changes that aims to make it possible and desirable to live with less. 

The sufficiency-as-maximum approach can also be applied to money. In Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth (2025), the philosopher Ingrid Robeyns argues for a cap on wealth accumulation. This is the concept of an “extreme wealth line” (EWL) explored in the New Economies for Eradicating Poverty project launched by the United Nations (the policy profile is actually written by Ingrid Robeyns herself). The EWL provides a “context-sensitive reference point for identifying levels of individual net wealth associated with elevated risks to democratic governance, ecological sustainability, economic resilience, fiscal capacity, human rights protections, and the integrity of social and institutional trust. It is similar in concept to the extreme poverty line, but instead of defining the minimum resources needed to live with dignity, it defines ‘how much is too much’.”

The most sophisticated uses of the term “sufficiency” blend (a) minimum & maximum thresholds, include (b) monetary & non-monetary resources, span both (c) supply & demand, and consider both (d) individual & structural changes. Schramme (2024, p. 2), for example, speaks of “sustainable sufficientarianism,” which aims at achieving “a level of provision that enables everyone, including future people, to live the best possible life that is reasonably feasible, given the task of maintaining livable conditions for all.” For Slameršak et al. (2026), sufficiency is “a corridor between production and consumption floors […] where human needs are satisfied universally, and production and consumption ceilings where economic activity remains within safe ecological limits.” More generally, Gough (2023) proposes the term “sufficiency economy,” defining sufficiency as “the space between a generalizable notion of human wellbeing and ungeneralisable excess” (italics in original). 

Degrowth and green growth 

If sufficiency is the principle of “enough,” which justifies specific policies and practices, I would say that degrowth is its macroeconomic counterpart: the deliberate, equitable downscaling of an economy as a whole. And just as sufficiency is usually posed against efficiency, degrowth is posed against green growth, the wager that GDP can keep growing while footprints decrease due to the eco-efficiency gains brought by technological progress. 

The concept of degrowth (décroissance) emerged in France in the early 2000s (for a detailed history, see Chapter 5: Origins and definitions). In the way the term is being used today, it has three interdependent dimensions: a critique, a strategy, and a utopia. Originally, it was born as a critical theory continuing an older tradition of “objections to growth” dating back at least to the 1970s. Additionally, it is also used as a specific transition strategy. In my own work – in Slow down or die (2025) and more formally in “Defining degrowth” (2025) –, I have defined the term as a “downscaling of production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints planned democratically in a way that is equitable while securing wellbeing.”^[6] Finally, the third dimension focuses on a utopian vision (one could also say a society project). A good example is Kallis and D’Alisa (2025, p. 16) who define degrowth as “a compass of classless, egalitarian societies of frugal abundance – of personal sobriety, socialized sufficiency (and organising principle of production as it is in the commons), and collective luxury.” Degrowth is all these three things together: (1) a critique of economic growth justifying (2) a transitional slowdown of rich economies making way for (3) a radically different economic system (often described with terms like “post-growth” and “post-capitalism”).  

Usually, the modelling literature studies degrowth as a transition. There are two main ways of modelling it. GDP can be treated as an exogenous target imposed on the model, or it can be an endogenous outcome that emerges from a bundle of modelled policies. A good example of the first approach is Kikstra et al. (2024) who use an IAM to model 51 scenarios where Australian consumption levels are capped between $10k and $70k. Likewise, Moyer (2023) uses another IAM to simulate several scenarios that contract global GDP by -30% to -92% (see Table 2, p. 10). This target-based, ‘max-GDP’ approach is the one chosen by the team of the Global Justice Project (I shall return to this at greater length in the next section). 

Sometimes, these negative growth scenarios are used in an attempt to discredit degrowth. For instance, in a 2017 blogpost, the economist Branko Milanovic argues that degrowth would reduce the income of 90% of the population of rich countries, concluding that “degrowth is not the way to go” (italics in original; for a response, see Parrique, 2019, p. 376-378 and Hickel, 2020, 2021). More recently, Warlenius (2023) uses a simple IPAT equation to demonstrate that, to reach the 2°C target, the economies of the global North would need to contract by over 90%, leading to the conclusion that since it is “very unlikely to happen” and “politically unfeasible,” then one should rather try to pursue green growth (for a response, see Jackson et al., 2024). 

These exogenous negative GDP growth scenarios can be misleading if they equate degrowth with a simple recession. The difference between the two phenomena has been explained many times (Parrique, 2019, pp. 322-330). Hickel (2020, p. 1108), for example, lists six differences: degrowth is planned, selective, and environmentally motivated while designed to avoid austerity, undesirable unemployment, and inequality. Put differently, a recession is an unplanned contraction experienced in an economic system built to require growth (that’s why recessions are considered undesirable). Degrowth, on the other hand, involves redesigning growth-dependent institutions in order to both degrow without disaster (in the short-term) and to prosper without growth (in the long-term) – for research on growth imperatives and dependencies, see Keyßer et al., 2025, and Corlet Walker et al., 2024). That’s why I prefer to reserve the term “degrowth” when speaking about these specific cases of planned macroeconomic slowdown, while using more generic terms to describe general contractions (e.g., recession, negative GDP growth, slump, decline). 

And yet, there is a more interesting way to model degrowth. Instead of treating GDP as a lever (which it is not in reality), one could study specific policies to see what happens to GDP, among other, more interesting variables. Zwetsloot et al. (2026), for instance, simulate seven degrowth policies in Sweden between 2026 and 2050.^[7] Capital decommissioning removes a fixed fraction of accumulated capital per year (4% for livestock and industry, 3% for other agriculture, and 0% for services), corporate taxes slow down investments into new capital formation (50% for livestock and industry and 35% for other sectors), fossil fuel phase-out decommissions part of the energy infrastructure, and work time reduction (-55% over the period) pushes production down. But these contractive policies are complemented by other social measures: a global redistribution scheme, progressive taxation, and a universal basic income (p. 4). These are measures to ensure that the downscaling of production and consumption induced by other policies happens “in a way that is equitable while securing wellbeing,” as noted in the previously mentioned definition of degrowth. In the study, the cumulated result of the seven policies is a contraction of the Swedish GDP of approximately 35% over the period ( -1.7%/yr), which happens in parallel to a reduction of poverty, inequality, and unemployment. That’s degrowth by design as opposed to recession by disaster (the expression is from Victor, 2019).

Another good example is the PhD work of Briens (2015) who built a highly detailed multisector model of the French economy to explore several transition scenarios from 2010 to 2060, with a focus on low-demand scenarios. Of the three scenarios investigated at the time, with a base year in 2012, the most radical assumed a reduction in animal products by 70-95%, a ten-fold reduction of military expenditures, an increase in cohabitation, a downshift to one car for 20-30 people, a five-fold reduction in long-distance travel, etc. (details pp. 312-324). These are the contractive assumptions. To this, Briens adds several social policy reforms (e.g., a maximum income at four times the minimum wage, a guaranteed minimum wage of 700-800€ in place of various existing schemes, and a work time reduction policy). In terms of GDP, the French economy contracts by 50% over the 2010-2060 period (≈ -1.3%/yr). This happens in parallel to a 35% decrease in worked hours, a reduction in unemployment (< 2.5% after 2030), and a stabilisation of the public debt below 60% of GDP. Despite very conservative technology assumptions, this degrowth scenario shrinks energy footprint by 75%, carbon footprint by 79%, reduces the volume of waste by half, while also reducing water use and air pollution. Again, this is a macroeconomic diet that is environmentally effective and socially desirable. 

A third and, in some ways, more ambitious example is Mihci and Attar (2026), who use an environmentally extended multi-regional input-output model (built on the GLORIA dataset) to simulate degrowth scenarios across six countries (US, UK, Germany, Turkey, South Africa, and China) between 2022 and 2032. Rather than imposing a GDP trajectory, they model four concrete policies and let output evolve as a consequence. On the contractive side, inessential high-emission sectors are downscaled, with managed divestment cutting capital formation in those same sectors faster than production itself. On the social side, there is a 25% reduction in working hours with no loss of pay, a guaranteed income and a maximum income, and a universal basic income. Their headline scenario cuts GHG emissions by 56% for a GDP contraction of 27% over a decade (≈ −3.1 %/yr). This happens while levels of inequality both within and between countries go down, and with almost no change in employment. What makes this paper genuinely distinctive, though, is its final move. To choose among its six hypothetical scenarios, they rank them using multi-criteria decision analysis under a range of political preference structures, showing that a specific scenario wins across the plurality of perspectives, even though it shrinks consumption and GDP substantially. 

For more examples of postgrowth modelling studies, see the inventories by Pérez-Sánchez and Slameršak (2026) and Lauer et al. (2025). In an article titled “Principles for a post-growth scenario of ambitious mitigation and high human well-being,” Slameršak et al. (2026) propose five core principles: well-being, sufficiency, reduced inequalities, realigned economy [i.e., improvement of essential production, downscaling of less-necessary activities, and advancement in labour rights], and north-south convergence (see Table 1). In summary, what makes a degrowth scenario is not only its final impact on GDP but rather the ambition to transform the structure of an economic system towards a smaller but more socio-ecologically efficient metabolism. One can therefore differentiate degrowth-oriented policies (degrowth treated as a means, which conceptually is close to the idea of a sufficiency policy) and degrowth as an end, a situation with smaller output, lower footprints, and better wellbeing (that’s close in meaning to Gough’s “sufficiency economy” and ideas like steady-state economy, eco-socialism and the wellbeing economy). 

Green growth, by contrast, is a hypothesis positing that GDP can keep rising during the transition while environmental pressure falls (hence the notion of “decoupling”). The fair version of the green-growth case grants that several high-income nations have already decoupled emissions from GDP. The rebuttal is that this has not occurred for most environmental pressures (e.g., Sanyé-Mengual et al., 2019), that most cases of decoupling are relative and not absolute, that many of these cases vanish under consumption-based accounting, that a large part of these cuts actually happen during recessions (e.g., Infante-Amate et al., 2025), and that the observed cuts fall far short of the pace required to achieve science-based targets (e.g., Vogel and Hickel, 2023), especially when taking into consideration environmental justice (e.g., Tilsted and Bjørn, 2023). The empirical case against this is by now substantial (Haberl et al., 2020; Parrique et al., 2019; Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Vadén et al., 2020), and it’s this empirical shortfall, not an a priori hostility to eco-efficiency,  that motivates the degrowth claim that rich countries must reduce the scale of economic activity (sufficiency), not merely its impact intensity (efficiency). 

In the report, the Sustainable Convergence scenario (henceforth SC) is contrasted with two “growth-focused” scenarios – Productivist Convergence (PC) and Persistent Inequality (PI). The team behind the report refer to them as “‘green growth’ pathways,” which they say they are skeptical about. “A pathway that maintains material consumption growth at current rates while decarbonising production processes will only further transgress [planetary] boundaries” (p. 47). Compared to the PC scenario where all countries converge at 120k€ without any work time reduction, the increase in GDP in SC is indeed modest. As the authors remark: “note that by 2100, the size of the world economy […] is about twice as small in the SC scenario as in the two alternative scenario [PC and PI]” (p. 45). Indeed, SC pushes world GDP from 139 trillion euros in 2025 to 565 trillion in 2100 (+1.9 % yearly over the period) while the two other scenarios lead to a world GDP of €1,023 trillion (+2.7%) and €1,130 trillion (+2.8%). “[T]he SC scenario,” the authors write, “represents a significant attempt to apply the principles of material degrowth, at least in relative terms (i.e. relative to alternative high-growth scenarios).” 

The term “material degrowth” (p. 45) is clumsy.^[8] By that, the authors mean a change in the sectoral structure of the economy where the share of material-intensive sectors (food/agriculture, construction/housing, manufacturing, energy/mining, and transport) decreases while the share of less-material sectors like health and education increases. To avoid misunderstanding, I think it is preferable to avoid the use of the term “degrowth” in that context, which could easily be substituted by simpler terms. Concerning SC, it is a slow growth scenario in terms of world GDP, and in comparison with business-as-usual or PI and PC, it can be considered a bounded growth scenario for most high-income countries that have not yet reached the 60,000€ per capita target. 

Uniform degrowth 

Let’s now turn to the report’s central claim about degrowth. The authors phrase it like this: “we find that targeted sufficiency can be more effective than aggregate degrowth” (p.12). (This sentence is repeated several times throughout the report, sometimes adding “large” before “aggregate degrowth” or “uniform degrowth.”) Based on the conceptual elements discussed in the previous section, I’m going to argue that this label is misleading. This is a point worth making since it reveals a second, more striking discovery.  

The way Thomas Piketty and his team choose to explore degrowth is to cap world GDP per capita to specific levels. They calculate three alternative pathways to their SC Scenario (60k€)^[9], each having a different yearly GDP per capita target for all countries in the world in 2100 (45k€, 30k€, and 15k€). In the SC scenario, the GDP per capita grows by an annualised average of +1.60%/yr to reach 3.5 times today’s level in 2100 (aggregate world GDP, which also reflects population growth, rises about fourfold). That’s a bit faster than what has been observed in the past. Historically, per capita GDP was multiplied by 18 between 1800 and 2025, rising from €900 to €16,000, which represents a +1.3% average annual real growth rate (Bharti et al., 2025, p. 18).

Of the three other targets, two of them are still growth scenarios, even though more modest than SC and far more modest than PC and PI: +1.23%/yr for the 45k€ and +0.72%/yr for the 30k€. The only negative growth scenario is the GDP target of 15k€, which contracts world GDP by a yearly -0.15%, leading to a total reduction of -11% in 2100.^[10]

To get a better sense of what this means, let’s look at two random countries, one in the global North (France) and another one in the global South (Sudan). Under the SC scenario, the French monthly GDP per capita goes from 3,230€ in 2020 to 5,000€ in 2100, a total increase of +54%, or +0.55% per year. To compare, the PC scenario triples the French GDP (+209%) with an annual compound rate of +1.42%/yr. As for the 45k€ target, it’s still a growth scenario but much more modest (+16% in total, or +0.19%/yr). The 30k€ and 15k€ are negative growth scenarios, shrinking GDP by respectively -22% (-0.32%/yr) and -61% (-1.18%/yr). (To put these numbers in perspective, the average yearly growth rate of the French economy over the last decade was around 1%.)

Sudan starts from a much lower GDP per capita (51€ per month). In the SC scenario, it experiences a yearly +5.9% growth that multiplies its GDP by a factor of 98 over the period. All the other scenarios are also growth scenarios: +5.52%/yr to reach the 45k€, +4.99%/yr to reach the 30k€, and +4.08%/yr to reach the 15k€. Note that even the 15k€ target is a convergence scenario: rich countries like France contract while poor countries like Sudan grow toward the common target – an important remark since many detractors of degrowth like to mislead, affirming that degrowth would contract all countries in the same manner. A good example of such mischaracterisation is the American economist Noah Smith, who recently commented on the report, saying that “Piketty’s preferred solution to climate change is degrowth. He envisions detailed central planning to achieve deliberate impoverishment of large portions of the world’s population — mandated reductions in the consumption of various specific goods, including food” (for a general rebuttal, see Parrique, 2019, pp. 368-383). 

Figure 1: The 15k€ scenario (Chancel et al., 2026b)

Let’s continue to understand the methodology of the report: each of these scenarios is further divided into two pathways. There is one “without sectoral change” (in blue in Figure 2), and another one “with sectoral change” (in pink in Figure 2), involving the four major transformations associated with the idea of sufficiency (see details in the report pp. 33-43). There is (1) a reduction in working time (from 2,100 hours per employed individual in 2025 to 1,000 hours in 2100); (2) a reduction in the share of material sectors (transport, energy, manufacturing, construction, housing, and food) in gross national expenditure (from 53% to 35%), and a reallocation of labour toward education and health, whose share of global labour hours rises from 11% in 2025 to 43% in 2100; (3) an increase in forest cover (from 4.1 billion hectares to 4.8 billion), which requires a significant reduction in meat production/consumption; and (4) three hypothetical energy transitions (slow, intermediate, and fast decarbonisation), with the most ambitious one phasing out coal, gas, and oil by 2100, with an energy mix solely composed of hydropower-solar-wind electricity (78%) and low-carbon fuels (22%). 

Figure 2: The Uniform Degrowth scenario (Chancel et al., 2026a)

We can now better understand the phrase I cited earlier. “Targeted sufficiency can be more effective than large aggregate degrowth” means that the SC scenario (60k€ with sectoral change) cuts more emissions than the 15k€ degrowth scenario without sectoral change. But the term is inaccurate since, as I showed in the previous section, degrowth is never envisioned as a blind contraction of GDP. They make the point that “the sectoral composition of production and consumption patterns matters – and not only the level of GDP” (p. 49), and everyone would agree.^[11] But to avoid falling into a common (and often debunked, see, for example, Hickel, 2020) mischaracterisation of degrowth, one should in fact say that targeted sufficiency can be more effective than a recession. One could object that the authors model the “without sectoral change” pathways deliberately, in order to isolate the effect of the GDP lever from that of structural change. Fair enough, but this is precisely why labelling the bare-contraction pathway “uniform degrowth” is unfortunate: it invites readers to equate a concept that, by definition, bundles contraction with  structural changes, with its exact opposite (a uniform recession). 

I concede that, phrased like that, the finding loses a bit of its charm. But don’t worry because there is another way of interpreting these results. It goes like this: the best-performing scenario to lower global temperature is the 15k€ degrowth scenario with structural change. This is the only one that achieves the 1.5°C target. In fact, all the degrowth scenarios with structural change outperform SC: 553 Gt for the 15k€, 776 Gt for the 30k€, and 955 Gt for the 45k€, compared to 1,075 Gt for SC. The most radical degrowth scenario brings down total emissions to half of SC and one fourth of the business-as-usual projection. This is acknowledged in one of the working papers (p. 5): “we find that this [substantial absolute degrowth for rich countries] could lead to significantly better outcomes on the climate front, with a limitation of temperature rise close to 1.5°C by 2100.” One of the main findings of the Global Justice Project is therefore that degrowth can be more effective than targeted sufficiency.^[12]

This slightly changes the angle of the discussion. “We therefore argue that integrating the cultural transformation that sufficiency brings into public discourse may not only be more politically viable […] but also more effective environmentally” (p. 49). For the sake of precision, the SC scenario is more effective environmentally than two green growth scenarios (PC and PI), a business-as-usual scenario (60k€ without sectoral change), and three negative growth scenarios (15k€, 30k€, 45k€) without sectoral change, but it is less effective environmentally than the three degrowth scenarios with sectoral change. It is completely okay to opt for a less ambitious, more politically palatable scenario, but it should not obscure the fact that, of all options considered, degrowth-inspired strategies are the fastest way for the global North to decarbonise.^[13]

I’m not arguing that a 15,000-euro GDP per capita should be considered the grail of the ecological transition. It’s a random number, just like €60,000 or €45,000. What’s interesting is what the difference between these pathways tells us about the link between GDP and macro-ecological footprints. It fits the theory: the smaller the volumes of production and consumption, the lower the rates of resource extraction and the softer the environmental impacts (for more, see Parrique, 2026). In the midst of stagnating ecological efforts, rich countries should do everything they can to reduce their (massive) environmental footprints, even if it lowers their national income. Placing a 60,000€ target in 2100 for global North countries risks legitimating their current economic size.  

The case for degrowth can be made even stronger on the report’s own terms. In one of the working papers (Chancel et al., 2026, Section 7), the authors incorporate the valuation of leisure and planetary habitability into a more comprehensive welfare measure they call augmented GDP. For working time, they assume that an additional hour of leisure carries the same marginal value as an hour of work; said differently, leisure is valued at the foregone hourly wage. Because the SC reaches 60k€ with 1,000 hours of annual work, against 2,000 hours for PC and PI, the 1,000 freed hours are worth a further 60k€, lifting SC’s augmented GDP to 120k€.

To this the authors add the value of avoided warming. SC limits the temperature rise to 1.8°C, some 2.3°C below the PI/PC benchmark of 4.1°C-4.2°C. Scaled linearly from the Dietrich-Nichols (2025) estimate, that differential is equivalent to a 45% gain in subjective well-being, and, at an assumed 10% of output lost per degree, a further 31% gain in output. Compounding these on top of the leisure-augmented figure brings SC to 227k€, twice as large as per capita GDP in PC/PI. “To summarize,” the authors write, “the Sustainable Convergence scenario appears to be twice more desirable than the alternative scenarios when we look at comprehensive well-being, while the opposite was true when we focused on traditional per capita GDP.” 

This invites a question the authors do not pursue: what augmented GDP would a radical degrowth scenario attain under the very same accounting? If the 60k€ scenario requires 1,000 hours of yearly work (i.e., 25 hours per week), and the PC/PI requires twice that, let’s say that a 15k€ scenario would only require one fourth of that, so 250 hours per year, a little over five hours a week. Measured against the same 2,000-hour comparative benchmark, the 1,750 freed hours are worth 105k€, so the leisure-augmented GDP is once again 120k€. This is no coincidence. Under the authors’ rule, an hour of leisure is valued the same as an hour of work. However, what if we were to value leisure time more than work?^[14] Then a degrowth scenario with radical, selective cuts in production and consumption would bring more welfare than more work-intense scenarios.

It is the climate effect that breaks in favour of degrowth. As we’ve seen earlier, 45k€ and 30k€ with sectoral changes limit warming to 1.7°C, and 15k€ with sectoral change limits warming to 1.5°C (against 1.8°C for SC and 4.1-4.2°C for PC/PI). Applying their valuation consistently, the 15k€ scenario enjoys a 2.6°C differential, worth a 53% well-being gain and a 35% output gain. Compounded on its leisure-augmented base of 120k€, this yields an augmented GDP of about 248k€, above SC’s 227k€. As for the 45k€ and 30k€ scenarios reaching 1.7°C, they land at roughly 232k€, also above SC. On the framework’s own terms, then, the targeted degrowth scenarios are not merely competitive with SC, they achieve better results. 

Does sufficiency mean degrowth?

 “Sufficiency does not mean degrowth,” writes Cornelia Mohren in an interview given for The Guardian. “It is about less working hours, a different composition of consumption, and more health and education.” Let’s dissect this claim carefully with the conceptual ground we’ve just covered. The authors differentiate sufficiency from degrowth (which they understand as an end, looking at GDP as a target) following the results of their modelling exercise, which finds that it is possible for rich countries to limit global temperature to 1.8°C while maintaining their GDP at current levels.

In the Global Justice Project’s report (p. 6), sufficiency is defined as “a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use” (that’s the four transformations described in the previous section). Cornelia Mohren is right in her affirmation because, in SC, most rich countries implement these sufficiency-oriented policies while growing their economies – hence her statement that “sufficiency does not mean degrowth” – I say “most” because there are only two countries – Norway (70.9k€) and Denmark (60.1k€) with a per capita GDP higher than the 60k target in 2025.^[15]

Degrowth scholars might object that what the authors of the Global Justice Project describe as a sufficiency strategy is very close to what others define as degrowth. Consider, for example, the degrowth proposal summarised by Krpan et al. (2025, supplementary materials, pp. 3-4). The second paragraph captures the changes in consumption patterns (“scale down non-essential forms of production and consumption”) and the third focuses on “ensuring universal access to high-quality public services (e.g., healthcare, education, public transit, childcare), affordable housing, and living wages.” They don’t mention work time reduction in that specific description but many others do. In fact, it’s one of the most popular degrowth proposals. It’s the second most frequently studied policy in the 75 degrowth and postgrowth-related modelling works reviewed by Lauer et al. (2025). It’s also the most popular policy objective and the second most popular policy instrument among the 530 degrowth proposals analysed by Fitzpatrick et al. (2022, p. 8 / p. 10). 

Conceptually, there is little difference between degrowth-oriented and sufficiency-oriented policies, and these two terms have more commonalities than differences. The disagreement is elsewhere. Degrowthers posit that the sufficiency policies required to bring a high-income country back within its planetary boundaries are so significant that it would necessarily involve a contraction of GDP. The team invests all its hope in the Sustainable Convergence (SC) scenario, which they describe in their tribune in The Guardian as “an economically and ecologically compatible path.” And that’s where the disagreement lies. Unfortunately, the architecture of the model in its current form won’t be able to settle the debate, but let’s nonetheless propose a few open-ended questions. 

There is a first general point worth making. The Global Justice Project functions with a single environmental constraint, having to do with greenhouse gases and global warming. The authors are perfectly aware of that, and they stress this very point in the conclusion of the report (pp. 128-129).^[16] And yet, in terms of actual modelling, they don’t walk the talk. It’s always good to remember that carbon is only one colour of the Rubik’s cube. In addition to climate change, there are eight other planetary boundaries. What is considered ecologically sustainable from the sole perspective of climate change might not be when looked at from a multidimensional planetary boundary perspective. For example, from a climate-only lens, data centres are not particularly problematic if they run on low-carbon energies. And yet, they can be a problem if they require a lot of materials, artificialise land, consume large volumes of water, and degrade surrounding biodiversity. A scenario that decarbonises while quadrupling the size of the world economy may simply shift the pressure from one kind of overshoot to another, one that is perhaps not represented in the model. 

The authors state that “all countries [should be] able to sharply reduce the share of material sectors” (p. 39), pointing to Norway and Sweden, where 30-35% of labour hours go to education and health. However, the shift towards a service-based economy in Nordic countries did not coincide with a fall in material use. Take Norway: between 1992 and 2021, Norwegian GDP rose 86% while its material footprint increased by 93%, meaning material productivity actually fell by 4%, the opposite of what dematerialisation predicts. Sweden does better (+95% GDP against +56% material footprint, a 25% gain in material productivity),but even there the footprint kept climbing in absolute terms; tracking its domestic material consumption, it has consistently remained above 20 tonnes per capita, with a +10.8% increase between 2000 and 2023. (For a similar argument concerning the evolution of greenhouse gases in Nordic countries, see Tilsted et al., 2021.) 

Rich economies enjoy apparent immateriality precisely because they import the material substrate of their service economies. In a world where every country dematerialises at once, it is hard to see who builds and maintains – let alone expands – the material infrastructure necessary to run a service economy.^[17] This is, in fact, the “striking finding” that the authors report in one of the working papers (p. 31): “there was actually no decline in the share of material sectors in final consumption expenditure over the 1970-2025 period. At the global level, [the share rose] from 40% to 42%.” Their conclusion is worth keeping in mind: “there is no reason to expect market-driven economic development to lead to a major shift from material to immaterial sectors. Past development patterns rather seem to be characterized by an addition – rather than a substitution – of expenditure patterns.” This is the story of “more and more and more” told by the environmental historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. I don’t think it’s only a market problem here; we’re rather dealing with an inescapable physical feature that applies to all economic systems. 

Then, there is the issue of unpredictable risks. In the report, the temperature outcome is overwhelmingly driven by the assumed change in the energy mix. Under a fast decarbonisation pathway, SC keeps warming to 1.8°C. But if decarbonisation is only intermediate, reflecting current national pledges and commitments, the warming jumps up to a catastrophic 2.7°C. And under the slow decarbonisation assumption, which reflects only currently implemented policies, warming reaches a Mad Max-like 3.3°C by 2100. In other words, the headline 1.8°C result is conditional on a hypothetical, best-case scenario energy transition, which is a risk. In SC, sufficiency already does 44% of the work of emission reduction, against 56% for the energy transition, and the report rightly stresses that these two strategies are complementary. One could go the extra mile and project scenarios that lean even harder on sufficiency, to the point of turning into degrowth scenarios. 

Extra efforts matter. SC limits warming to a global temperature rise of 1.8°C in 2100, but this overshoots the 1.5°C threshold defined as the safe boundary for the climate-change dimension of the planetary-boundary framework. 1.5°C was also the most ambitious target in the Paris Agreement whose Article 2 speaks of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” As I showed in the previous section, the only pathway in the report that actually reaches 1.5°C is the most radical degrowth scenario (15k€) with structural change. This is one more reason to explore more ambitious sufficiency/degrowth scenarios in already-rich countries.

This becomes especially important when we discuss climate justice. The more we include historical emissions, the more it shrinks the carbon budget fair-shares of high-income nations, forcing them to cut emissions much more rapidly. For instance, Tilsted and Bjørn (2023) examine the Danish target of reducing emissions by 70% of 1990 levels by 2030, concluding that it appears “drastically insufficient.” Using different burden sharing approaches to reach 1.5°C, they show that the remaining carbon budget is much smaller than the legislated one. A thorough inclusion of historical responsibility^[18] even brings the remaining emissions budget into negative territory, requiring between -151 and -442 MtCO₂eq of negative emissions (see Figure 2, p. 14). 

Another doubt concerns the engine of the model itself. Throughout the scenarios, GDP keeps rising even as working hours fall, because labour productivity is assumed to grow more or less autonomously. But this independence is questionable. Historically, much of the measured growth in labour productivity has been underwritten by the rising energy and material throughput which gives each worker more powerful tools (Ayres and Warr, 2005, 2009). If a sufficiency transition genuinely shrinks the biophysical scale of the economy, it is not obvious that labour productivity can keep climbing at the assumed pace. The report may thus be importing, through its productivity assumptions, precisely the throughput it claims to be retiring through its sufficiency aspirations.   

Perhaps my general point is simply this: I would like to see more radical sufficiency/degrowth scenarios. If the most sustainable resource is the one we manage not to use, why not invest further in the idea of producing and consuming less in countries that already have more than enough? Some will say it is utopian and therefore better left unsaid, but the authors are already being attacked as utopians! Worse, they are being attacked as “degrowthers.”^[19] These cheap shots are the sad evidence that our collective imaginary around the economics of social-ecological transitions is still pretty barren. But if they cannot escape being labelled as “degrowth advocates,” they might as well harness the full power of the literature on the subject.

Conclusion

“Our main conclusion,” write the authors at the end of the report (p. 128), “is that it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but that this requires a major shift towards sufficiency (including a sharp reduction in labour hours and a large change in consumption patterns, food habits and land use), fast decarbonization of energy systems requiring unprecedented climate investments, and most importantly a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power in order to ensure that these transformations are economically financed and politically sustained.” 

That’s a powerful finding. This could be another Meadows moment where a piece of research comes to shake the very foundations of our collective imaginary. In this response, I have proposed several refinements meant to make the claim even more rigorous – and more revolutionary – than it already is: a sharper vocabulary on sufficiency and degrowth, a more optimistic reading of hypothetical degrowth scenarios, and a few open questions about the biophysical viability of the Sustainable Convergence scenario. The Global Justice Project is opening a fantastic space for discussion, and I hope that many other scholars will be as eager as I am to join the party.  

^[1] The report is supported by two underlying working papers (Chancel et al., 2026b and Bothe et al., 2026), and a number of other publications from the World Inequality Lab: Andreescu et al. (2025a) on global labour hours, Nievas and Piketty (2025) on unequal exchange and North-South relations, Bharti et al. (2025) on the evolution of human capital, Bauluz et al. (2025) on global wealth accumulation and ownership patterns, and Andreescu et al. (2025b) on equality and development. 

^[2] “A good life for the 99% isn’t a pipe dream: it can be done. Here’s how” (The Guardian); “‘Happiness is not just about GDP’: ambitious plan or utopia?” (The Guardian); “Les ambitieuses pistes du laboratoire codirigé par Thomas Piketty pour réduire les inégalités mondiales tout en limitant le réchauffement climatique” (Le Monde); “Inégalités, sobriété, décarbonation et redistribution : le projet utopique de Thomas Piketty” (Le Point), “Argent, travail, écologie… Les trois idées choc de ces économistes qui ont imaginé un monde utopique en 2100” (Huffpost); “Climat : concilier habitabilité de la planète et bien-être pour tous est possible, estiment des économistes” (Sud Ouest); “Thomas Piketty et un groupe d’économistes proposent un plan pour une vraie équité mondiale” (Ouest France); “Le modèle de sobriété que nous proposons dessine une autre définition de la prospérité” (Alternatives Économiques).

^[3] For a literature review on the concept of sufficiency, see Jungell-Michelsson and Heikkurinen (2022) or Lage (2022). 

^[4] It seems that the authors share this understanding of the term when they summarise the sufficiency literature as “emphasiz[ing] reducing demand for resource-intensive goods and services rather than merely greening their production” (Chancel et al., 2026b, p. 8).

^[5] For my personally analysis of sufficiency in the IPCC AR6, see Parrique (2022). 

^[6] Another widely used definition of degrowth understood as a transition strategy is the one that emerged from the first international conference on the topic in Paris back in 2008: “An equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long-term [and which is] offered as a social choice, not imposed as an external imperative for environmental or other reasons” (Schneider et al., 2010, pp. 512-513). Another good, recent definition: “the planned and equitable downscaling of economic activities that are ecologically destructive and do not contribute to human well-being, to reduce ecological pressures and free up resources for decent living for all” (Slameršak et al., 2026).

^[7] The seven policies are described in Table 3 in Zwetsloot et al. (2026, p. 4): (1) global redistribution, (2) corporate taxes, (3) capital decommissioning, (4) fossil fuel phase-out, (5) progressive taxation, (6) universal basic income, and (7) work time reduction.  

^[8] I would also caution about the use of the “sustainability of economic growth.” In one of the working papers (Andreescu et al., 2025, p. 24), it is used in a mainstream fashion, referring to the idea of “sustained growth,” meaning a rate of growth that can be maintained over time. This could be confusing since they use the same term in their “sustainable convergence” scenario, but this time stressing ecological sustainability. 

^[9] “The 60k benchmark target for 2100,” the authors write, “has been chosen because it is approximatively equal to the level currently observed in the world’s richest countries” (Chancel et al., 2026b, p. 26). For example, it is currently 70k€ in Norway, 60k€ in Denmark, 59k€ in the United States, and 42k€ in Europe.

^[10] But what happens after 2100? The answer lies buried in one of the working papers (pp. 39-40): a “post-2100 steady state.” By “steady state,” they do not mean the concept of Herman Daly, who conceptualised a no-growth economy with stable biophysical throughput, but rather a “steady-state growth path” where “all countries in the world are on a balanced growth path with per capita GDP growth rate equal to 0.8% per year” (p. 39). 

^[11] “These results demonstrate that if fast decarbonization and shifts in consumption patterns prove unattainable, even “degrowth” in today’s rich countries cannot limit warming to tolerable levels” (Chancel et al., 2026b, p. 57, italics added). 

^[12] This is consistent with the literature. Keyßer and Lenzen (2021), for example, compares 1.5°C degrowth pathways with IPCC archetype scenarios, finding that “the degrowth scenarios minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability compared to technology-driven pathways, such as the reliance on high energy-GDP decoupling, large-scale carbon dioxide removal and large-scale and high-speed renewable energy transformation.”

^[13] Figure 1.19 “Targeted sufficiency can be more effective than large uniform degrowth” (p. 49 of the report) has an interesting sentence in the note below the figure: “It might be difficult to combine 15k with structural change, as this implies large reduction in average food intake.” To the best of my knowledge, this is the only downside of that scenario mentioned by the authors.  

^[14] One way to counter this argument would be to demonstrate the existence of a “leisure satiation” effect, as hypothesised in one of the working papers (Andreescu et al., 2025, p. 26): “Generally speaking, the fact that the cross-sectional elasticity using contemporary data is lower than the historical elasticity could also be due to additional factors, including a possible “leisure satiation” effect since the 1980s-1990s. That is, the private value of additional leisure was arguably much larger when labour hours were as large as 50-60 hours per week (with no little or paid vacation) than it is today with 40 hours per week (or less) and several weeks of paid vacation. This could potentially contribute to explain the lowering of the elasticity since the 1980s-1990s.”

^[15] Keep in mind that the report divides the world GDP into a core set of 48 main countries, that’s why we don’t see these few countries that definitely have a higher GDP per capita than 60,000€ (e.g., Luxembourg, Qatar, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco). In any case, there are not many of them, and they represent only a small fraction of world GDP. 

^[16] “In particular, there are other planetary boundaries beyond climate change (biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, mining extractivism etc.), which are sometime more difficult to quantify, but which cannot be studied through decarbonization alone. These other boundaries should be explicitly included in our material accounting system in the future, together with monetary accounting” (pp. 128-129). 

^[17] Let me here reuse a paragraph from Decoupling debunked (2019, p. 42): “The development of new types of services adds-up to other polluting activities instead of substituting to them. Consumers buy a Netflix account with, and not instead, of a computer, and workers can produce services if they are nourished, transported, and housed, not instead of food, vehicles, and homes. Immaterial products require a material infrastructure. Software requires hardware, a massage parlour requires a heated room, and the platform on which we are writing these very words requires a computer along with all the material equipment and energy necessary to make the Internet run. Services cannot be generated without raw material extraction, energy provision, and infrastructure building, all of which are tightly coupled with environmental pressures. The expansion of the service sector can hardly be decoupled because it is part of an economy that grows as an integrated whole.”

^[18] To explore carbon budgets under different allocation principles, see the “Zero Carbon For All” online platform of the World Sufficiency Lab. For instance, let’s look at the required emission cut in Denmark to for 67% probability of not exceeding +1.5°C based on a consumption-based scope and on responsibility approach (i.e., considering the country’s cumulative emissions and its share of the global population between 1970 and 2050). While past emissions have evolved from 62 Mt in 1970 to 72 Mt in 2006 and 45 Mt in 2022, they would be required to fall to 0 Mt in 2023. 

^[19] As evidence, here are a few quotes from articles in the media responding to the report: “Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief. It’s dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels. These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care, and pensions, and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people” (V. De Rugy, Reason); “The report calls for the Global Justice Fund to be “governed by strict rules of democracy and transparency”, but then also wants it to prioritize degrowth. (…) the GJF would have to act as a kind of global dictatorship: imposing policies that voters would never back, policies favored exclusively, as far as I can tell, by a minuscule elite of first-world degrowther intellectuals who hang out with Thomas Piketty (…) But I’m indebted to Piketty for following the degrowth agenda through to its utmost consequences” (Q. Toro, 1% Brighter). Plus a few random posts on Twitter: “Piketty’s gone degrowth”; “this report pushes Piketty firmly into the so-called “degrowth” camp”; “it’s disappointing to see that Piketty has gotten onto the degrowth train to nowhere”; “I’d argue that pushing for degrowth will likely have corrosive effects on broad public suppport for stringent climate policy”; “The degrowth emphasis is concerning”; “This is the authoritarian socialist de-growth agenda.”

Is decoupling happening, yes, or no? And if not, could it ever happen? Over the course of a few weeks, The Guardian published several pieces on the topic that may appear contradictory, arguing both that “economic growth [is] no longer linked to carbon emissions” and that “economic growth is still heating up the planet.”^[1] This is perfect timing because the Cambridge Journal of Economics just published a stimulating article on the subject: “Degrowth as climate policy: From GDP to consumption reduction” (2026) by Jonathan Aldred, an Official Fellow and College Lecturer in economics at the University of Cambridge. I’ll take this paper as a point of departure to argue – like I’ve done several times before on this blog – that the green growth hypothesis is overblown. 

No miracles here

I hate to be a bird of ill omen but there seems to be some kind of mass hysteria going on about decoupling. Take The Guardian’s piece on Romania, which is as bombastic as it gets. A “breakneck transformation” that “shattered the link between economic growth and high emissions,” achieving decoupling, “the holy grail of the energy transition.” The article reports that greenhouse gas emissions plunged by 75 % between 1990 and 2023, reaching 3 tonnes per person, the second lowest in Europe. 

This looks like a miracle, but is it? I’ve never studied the case of Romania but a rapid look at the numbers is enough to realise that it is not a green growth heaven. First, most cuts in emissions occurred during periods of recession, which looks more like degrowth than green growth.^[2] Emissions were cut in half when the communist regime collapsed in the 1990s. The fall continued after that but at a much smaller pace, going from a yearly -3.5% during 1990-2005 to only -1,8% during 2005-2022. Second, if we take away the effect of reforestation, which was massive in Romania, the -25% becomes -15% (see data from the European Environment Agency). Third, these are territorial emissions. If we look at consumption-based emissions, the Romanian carbon footprint per capita has actually increased from 3.6 tonnes in 1999 to 4.1 tonnes in 2023. Finally, that’s only for greenhouse gas emissions, one of many environmental pressures. The country’s material footprint increased by 88% between 1992 and 2021. So, this is the miracle equivalent of making someone invisible, except that only one arm disappears.  

Figure 1: Territorial emissions in Romania (European Commission, 2024)

Figure 2: Per capita emissions in Romania (Our World in Data)

Next miracle: Ireland. A 2021 post on the website Our World in Data says that Irish consumption-based emissions per capita decreased by half between 2005 and 2020 while average income increased by +43%. Similarly, a post by The Breakthrough Institute (2021) affirms that Ireland reduced its consumption-based emissions by -52% between 2005 and 2019 while growing its GDP by +89%. In a study by ECIU (2025, p.8) also covered in The Guardian, Ireland is listed as a “consistent decoupler,” a country that has absolutely decoupled in both 2006-2015 and 2015-2023. 

Again, there is a trick. Let’s begin by noting that even the Irish state itself does not report an absolute decoupling, which should raise suspicion since governments are usually the first to trumpet green growth.^[3] To check what’s really happening in Ireland, let’s look at a decoupling analysis of economic growth and carbon emissions from 1995 to 2023 just published by team of four researchers from three Irish universities. The result is less dreamy: “Ireland saw intermittent decoupling from 1995 to 2023 but never sustained absolute decoupling” (Zhao et al., 2026, p. 7). In fact, their dataset shows that CO₂ emissions have increased during the 1990s-2000s and only started to decline after the 2008 financial crisis. Levels of emissions in 2023 are roughly the same as they were in 1995 – it’s the kind of decoupling that brings joy to economists but despair to climate scientists.  

Figure 3: Carbon emissions and GDP/GNI in Ireland (Zhao et al., 2026)

Let’s pause for a technical point. The Irish case is a perfect example of exagerated GDP. In order to exclude all the multinational-related financial flows that artificially inflate the Irish economy, Zhao et al. (2026) use a modified Gross National Income, whose growth is much smaller than the one of GDP (see Figure 3b). When you trim away the financial bling bling, the rates of decoupling are far from being miraculous.

This was the point made by Semienuk (2024): each new revision on how GDP is calculated includes more and more activities, which makes decoupling look larger than it actually is (See Figure 4). As the author explains, “between vintages [different methods of calculating GDP], 10-15% of countries switch between relative decoupling and recoupling from energy or materials on decadal intervals, and up to as many countries that decouple absolutely in an older vintage stop or newly start absolutely decoupling in the newer vintage” (p. 12). In an ecological transition, the shape of environmental curve matters much more than the shape of the economic curve, which means that cases of GDP-driven decoupling should not be considered miracle solutions to ecological issues. 

Figure 4: Variations between different vintages of GDP (Semienuk, 2024)

Let’s do a last one for sport. According to a (very) short study by the newly-created British think-tank Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), countries representing 92% of the global economy have now decoupled consumption-based carbon emissions and GDP growth. Hooray. And yet, one of the weaknesses of this analysis (it has many) is that it only looks at carbon intensity without considering the actual volume of emissions and their relation to climate targets. This gives the false impression that these decoupled economies are now growing carbon-free in a world where climate change is no longer a problem.

This is, of course, far from the truth. Another piece in The Guardian (“Economic growth is still heating the planet. Is there any way out?”) shows the ugly proof: a graph showing the massive increase of global emissions, going from 10 Gt in 1960 to almost 50 Gt in 2024. These emissions have never gone down except during large recessions (most notably Covid). 

Going beyond carbon, Fanning and Raworth (2025) estimate that the median level of ecological overshoot for the six crossed planetary boundaries went from 75% in 2000 to 96% in 2022. (On a side note, the 38 richest countries, including all the most celebrated decoupling cases, are responsible of 44% of all environmental pressures.) This accelerating degradation of ecosystems should make us think twice before cracking open a bottle of champagne when a country lowers the carbon intensity of its GDP by a few points. 

This kind of debunking gives me a Groundhog Day feeling, like in the 1993 film where Bill Murray is stuck living the same day over and over. Every now and then, someone brandishes raw data as proof that economic growth has been greened. As much as I would like this to be true, it takes little effort to demonstrate that the reality is not that rosy.   

Will the ecological transition grow or degrow the economy? 

Let’s now switch to a more theoretical question: Can high-income nations get back within planetary boundaries without contracting their GDP? There is a disagreement between those who think that the ecological transition will boost economic growth (green growth or decoupling) and others who argue that the downscaling of problematic goods and services will have a net negative effect on GDP (degrowth).

I should start by saying that this is not the most thrilling growth-related debate. As a radical demand for system change, the post-growth literature goes much further than this rather boring accounting question. Studying a complex social-ecological transformation with a GDP lens would be like judging a film by its length – a detail worth knowing but not the most essential feature. 

And yet, economists working on degrowth should not shy away from the question. In his article, Jonathan Aldred seems to side with green growth arguing that getting back within planetary boundaries must not necessarily require an overall reduction in levels of production and consumption. “[T]he material scale of economic activity is conceptually distinct from the value of that activity, measured by GDP. The causation, if it exists, from changes in material scale to changes in value (GDP), will be contingent on specific economic structures, and specific beliefs about value, in time and space” (p. 5). For the author, the coupling between the material and the monetary is “not inevitable or universal.” 

Two transition scenarios: degrowth and green growth

I slightly disagree and it will take a few logical steps to understand why. Let’s start by narrowing down the problem, sidestepping an even more theoretical debate on the long-term possibility of a sustainable, growing economy.^[4] The discussion we need to have is much more pragmatic. Given current levels of ecological overshoot and how they’re evolving, we know that something historically unprecedented needs to happen to get back within planetary boundaries (either decoupling or degrowth); what we don’t know is which one of these scenarios is more reliable. 

To better grasp the two strategies at hand, let’s start from the IPAT equation^[5]. If you want to reduce an environmental impact (I), you have three courses of action: shrink population (P), produce and consume less (A), or improve technology (T). For reasons I won’t repeat here, the demographic lever is not an option.^[6] Which leaves us with two ideal-typical ways of reaching an environmental target: contract economic activities (degrowth) or accelerate technological progress (decoupling). 

The IPAT identity allows us to put an order of magnitude on these strategies. Imagine a fictional economy that emits 100 MtCO₂each year with the strong commitment to bring down that number to a yearly 20 MtCO₂ in 10 years, requiring a yearly cut of 15% (the same logic can – and should – be applied to other environmental pressures). Let’s also say that in the previous decade, the emission intensity of that economy decreased by 20 % (so -2,2 % per year) while its economy grew by a yearly 1% per capita.

From these numbers, we can calculate two ways of reaching the climate target: an acceleration in technological progress leading to enough efficiency gains to cut emissions (in this fictional example: at least seven time faster than the historical -2.2% per year) or a contraction of economic activities caused by sufficiency policies (at least -12.9 % per year). 

In Cuny and Parrique (2024), we apply this method to the European Union (see Figure 5). To keep growing its GDP by a yearly +2% while achieving the -55% climate target in 2030, the EU would need to improve its carbon efficiency twice to four time faster – that’s the green growth scenario. But if the speed of efficiency improvements remains the same as observed throughout the 2010s, the only way to reach the climate target is to shrink GDP by a yearly -2% (the degrowth scenario).^[7] (With colleagues at the University of Lausanne, we’ll soon release a paper presenting a more sophisticated version of this method, which we apply to Switzerland.) 

Is decoupling more likely than degrowth? 

Which is more likely, a massive, historically unprecedented acceleration in ecological efficiency (green growth) or a massive, historically unprecedented contraction of GDP (degrowth)? “It is far from obvious that a future involving, say, 10% decoupling and zero growth is any less likely or realistic than one involving, say, 4% decoupling and 6% degrowth,” Jonathan Aldred writes (p. 10). 

The way I see it, these two ideal-typical scenarios are both unlikely but for different reasons. Degrowth is socially unacceptable but technically straightforward. Said differently, even though it would most probably work, there is little chance that current decision-makers decide to put it in action. Putting political, cultural, and economic challenges aside, degrowth has the benefits of being fast and reversible. 

It is fast because it impacts footprints today. Closing national flight routes means less planes in the air right now, compared to technological improvements in fuel efficiency that unfolds over longer periods of time. Degrowth also has the advantage of being reversible. Anything we scale back today is something we can possibly resume producing in the future if new, cleaner technologies allow it. Given how risky and unpredictable the ecological situation is, the precautionary nature of degrowth should be considered a valuable asset.  

The situation is reverse for green growth: it’s socially acceptable but technically uncertain. To ensure that ecological targets are met, one would need a twofold change in the pace (faster innovation) and direction of technological progress (more green innovation). To have an overall impact on macroecological footprints, green innovations must outpace polluting innovations while avoiding rebound effects. In other words, alternatives to polluting technologies (e.g., solar panels, heat pumps, e-bikes, alternative fuels, cultured meat) must emerge faster than new polluting technologies (e.g., AI, horizontal drilling, deep-sea mining, mega-fishing trawlers, wave pools), while being effectively deployed in replacement of old, polluting infrastructure, as opposed to being simply being added on top of it, as Jean-Baptiste Fressoz shows in More and More and More (2025). To cancel the effect of a growing production, the efficiency gains must always be superior to rates of economic growth. Since GDP growth is exponential, this requires a constant acceleration in the speed of green technological progress. And that’s where it gets risky. If these innovations fail to materialise, it’s game over. 

I wrote “technically uncertain” but I’m tempted to call it theoretically impossible.^[8] I can imagine building houses without emitting carbon but I can hardly imagine doing so without using materials and without impacting soils. We can surely lower the carbon intensity of energy by switching from oil, gas, and coal to solar, wind, and geothermal heat but this doesn’t mean we can keep producing forever more while using forever less energy. The decoupling argument suffers from a carbon bias. It believes that whatever we observe for carbon (a one-off drop in emission intensity during low-hanging fruit transitions) can be generalised for all environmental pressures and sustained forever. 

This is what I thought reading The Guardian’s piece about Romania. You can shift once from an industrial to a service-based economy and you can shift once from fossil fuels to lower-carbon forms of energy. This solves part of the carbon problem (assuming that industrial activities are not simply outsourced elsewhere) but it doesn’t secure other planetary boundaries, some of them much more difficult to decouple than carbon.

The Fanning and Raworth (2025) study shows that ecological indicators across all planetary boundaries have worsened at the pace of 3.9% per year between 2000 and 2022 (see Figure 5). In order to get back within safe levels by 2050, one would need to completely invert the trend, going from 3.9% worse per year to 6.9% better (for emissions, it means going from +3.1% per year to -3.4% per year). This is a colossal challenge that is greatly underestimated by decoupling optimists who rely too much on the joker card of technological progress. 

Figure 5: Historical patterns of overshoot (Fanning and Raworth, 2025)

Of course, one way of making endless growth possible would be to change the way we calculate GDP. For could, for example, include yet unrecorded activities just like it already happened for public services in the 1970s and illegal drugs in the 2010s. We could also try to better account for quality changes in products or recentre the concept of value-added on well-being (national accounting framework have been evolving slowly until now, but one never knows^[9]). Jonathan Aldred hints to this possibility when he writes that “changes in value (GDP), will be contingent on specific economic structures, and specific beliefs about value, in time and space” (p. 5). But changing the way you weigh a kilo of rice is not going to give you more food. The constraint here is not economic but environmental. 

Will the ecological transition boost economic growth? 

So far, I’ve treated the two scenarios as mutually exclusive: either a technological boost (decoupling) or an economic shrinkage (degrowth). What makes it more complicated is that these two phenomena may happen at the same time while affecting each other. There are four possible effects: economic growth can either accelerate or slowdown decoupling and decoupling can, in turn, either accelerate or slowdown economic growth. 

Let’s start by looking at how the ecological transition might affect economic activities. “[S]elective downsizing of the material economy may or may not lead to a fall in GDP, depending on whether GDP growth in the material-light economy, the renewable sector (and other essential sectors such as healthcare), outweighs GDP declines elsewhere in the economy” (p. 4).

Unfortunately, there is no macroeconomic model powerful enough to simulate these changes in detail. One of the most advanced simulations for France – Ademe’s “Transition(s) 2050” (2022) – concludes that a sufficiency-based scenario (S1 “Génération frugale”) would contract GDP for almost a decade before the economy starts growing again (see Figure 6).^[10] In the end, the post-transition GDP in 2050 would be 5.7% smaller in the sufficiency scenario compared to a business-as-usual forecast, this loss being the equivalent of four years of non-existent growth (Ademe, 2022, p. 14).

Figure 6: Evolution of GDP in the 4 scenarios (Ademe, 2022, p. 14)

Another way to ponder the question is to consider these changes sector by sector. Let’s try it out for transport. In 2023, the French government launched a 5-year plan aiming to invest 2 billion euros in active mobility. To put this sum in perspective, this is roughly the same amount of money invested each year in highways, which is itself small compared to the 13 billion euros spent annually just to maintain roads. The budget spent for the construction of one single highway (the 62 km of the A69 between Toulouse and Castres) is higher than the yearly budget allocated for active mobility in the whole country. Given how macroeconomically expensive car-based mobility is (reflected in its important contribution to GDP), it seems likely that a massive shift away from cars towards train, buses, and especially bikes and walks would contract GDP.

In the Ademe (2022, p. 196) sufficiency scenario (S1 “Génération frugale”), there is -26% reduction in distances travelled, half of all trips happening by bike or foot (-55% in the use of cars), the average weight of a car is reduced by -27% and the average speed by -12%. To minimise material and energy expenditure, bike lanes and sidewalks are installed within existing roads. Unfortunately, there is no macroeconomic analysis to determine the net impact of these changes on the contribution of the transport sector to GDP. But imagining a world where people work less and closer to where they live, where they use slower modes of transport and travel closer for holidays, and where cars are small and shared, produced by not-for-profit businesses with low profit margins, I struggle to find where all that additional growth could come from.  

There is another example mentioned by Jonathan Aldred that we can explore: more durable smartphones. Today, the average life expectancy of a smartphone in France ranges between 1,9 and 3 years. The legal hardware warranty on an iPhone is 2 years while it’s 5 years for a FairPhone. If all iPhone users were to get a FairPhone instead, they would replace their phones less often, which means we could all still have phones while producing 60% less of them. Additionally, since a FairPhone (552€) is cheaper than its iPhone equivalent (1329€), and since the profit margin of Apple products are much higher, it makes it even more likely than a switch from iPhone to FairPhone will contract GDP.

Let’s continue down the rabbit hole. Let’s imagine a world where phones are manufactured by publicly-funded, not-for-profit businesses with a strong commitment for sustainability. It seems reasonable to assume that such mode of production will generate less GDP points than its private, for-profit alternative. Plus, the value-added in repairing services is much lower than in manufacturing since repair services (and services in general) are more difficult to outsource to countries with lower wages. If people were to have access to open software, repair cafés, tool libraries, with available time on their hands to fix their phones themselves, there would not be much left of the phone industry in national accounts.  

One could continue, sector by sector, and product by product, but I suspect the results would be similar: phasing out nature-intensive goods and services would push rates of growth down because their alternatives are less GDP-intensive, and even more so in the smaller, post-capitalist world imagined by degrowthers. So, my answer to the question is a theoretical no: under these settings, it is highly unlikely that the ecological transition would boost economic growth – actually, it’s much more likely to have the precise opposite effect. A corollary argument is that a post-transition economy would run at a much lower level of GDP with must smaller – and rarer – rates of growth. 

Will degrowth slow down the ecological transition?  

Jonathan Aldred believes that degrowth will be detrimental to the ecological transition. For him, slower GDP growth means less private investment in green technologies, less public revenues (and thus less public investment in green technologies), and a more general “economic destabilisation” (he mentions unemployment). “If degrowthers believe that GDP degrowth is possible without adversely affecting decoupling rates, a specific argument in support of that claim is required” (p. 9). 

Here it goes. The first argument I want to make has to do with flows of investment. The ‘growth makes the transition easier’ argument only works if the majority of additional national income goes to green, and not polluting, investments. As we’ve seen earlier with the example of transport, this is not a given. This is a tricky balancing act. If you want economic growth to lower macroecological footprints, then you need green investments to crowd out brown investments; otherwise, economic growth is just doing the precise opposite, further exacerbating ecological overshoot. In an economy where businesses and governments are eager to invest in extractive and polluting activities (building highways, for example), a slower growth rate actually undermines their ability to do so, which is good from a sustainability perspective.

The second rebuttal is much more powerful. The ‘growth makes the transition easier’ argument is financially sound but biophysically flawed. From a monetary accounting perspective where money is the scarce resource, the more cash, the faster the transition. But this is not true when it comes to energy, land, water, materials, etc. In fact, one needs exactly the same materials to build a highway or a bike lane. You can argue that the more highways, the more revenues to build bike lanes, but this argument is not valid in a world where the limiting factor is natural resources (let’s remember here that high-income economies must lower, not only their carbon footprint, but also their material footprint, which will put a strain on available natural resources).

From a biophysical accounting perspective, if you build less highways, you’ll have more available resources to build something else. More generally, degrowth liberates a portion of the ecological budget either for deliberate non-use or for alternative purposes.

That’s why a shrinking of GDP is good news. Not only because it lightens macroecological footprints but also because it frees up factors of production. Jason Hickel, the author of Less is more: How degrowth will save the world (2021), argues that scaling down certain sectors and products, starting with the least necessary, could make resources available for ecological projects: “factories that are presently devoted to producing SUVs can produce solar panels instead. Engineers that are presently developing private jets can work on innovating more efficient trains and wind turbines instead. Labour that is presently employed by fast fashion firms can be liberated to train and contribute to installing renewable capacity” (Hickel, 2023). 

From this perspective, unemployment in nature-intensive sectors is a blessing because it frees up hours of available work for other activities, some of them non-economic in nature (hence the disappearance of part of GDP during a degrowth-inspired transition). Before resorting to panic at the thought of unemployment, let’s remember that the very purpose of an economy is to economise, to find more parsimonious ways of securing quality of life. An economy that destroys unecessary jobs, thus reducing average working time, is an economy doing what an economy is supposed to do.

Let’s continue the passage from Jason Hickel: “it helps to recognize that when we talk about ‘investment’, money is just the vehicle.  The real investment actually takes the form of allocating real productive capacity: real labour, materials, energy etc.  Once we understand this fact, it becomes clear that a degrowth scenario enables investment in green production and innovation, by making real productive capacity available” (ibid, italics in original). 

This circles all the way back to John Maynard Keynes’s aphorism “anything we can do, we can afford.”^[11] Anything we can do in terms of labour and resources can be financially arranged, but the reverse is not true. Even with all the money in the world, you won’t be able to grow food on a dead soil or build a house without materials (except if walls, floors, and windows are made of actual bills and coins). The lesson for 21st century sustainability is this: biophysically, degrowth is a sine qua non condition for selective green growth. 

Going from theories to policies 

In this debate, it is easy to get stuck in dogmatic positions: degrowth or decoupling. But when it comes to actual policies and real changes in the daily functioning of the economy, the distinction between these position is more nuanced. But to understand how so, we first need to clarify the difference between degrowth policies and green growth policies.

There is no magic button, no volume knob hidden at the Ministry of Finance that can switch GDP up and down. When economists talk about “growth policies,” it means reforms aimed at boosting GDP (with no absolute guarantee that they do so). The concept of growth policy is pretty straightforward since it has a single objective: increasing GDP. A green growth policy is an umbrella terms for all reforms attempting to make economic growth less environmentally-impactful. 

For degrowth, it’s more complicated. Jonathan Aldred remarks that “the policy implications are still unclear. Should minimal/zero growth or modest degrowth be a direct objective of policy? If so, how is it to be pursed?” (p. 9). Let’s try to answer this question methodically. In The political economy of degrowth (2019, p. 485), I define degrowth policy as “a course or principle of action adopted or proposed by an organisation or individual aiming to achieve the objectives of degrowth.” 

However, this remains tautological if one doesn’t spell out the objectives of degrowth. That’s what I tried to do in the paper Defining degrowth (2025), defining the term as “a downscaling of production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints, planned democratically in a way that is equitable while securing wellbeing” – that’s the definition I’ve used in Slow down or die. The economics of degrowth(2025), the translation of Ralentir ou périr. L’économie de la décroissance (2022). Degrowth is a very specific kind of economic contraction, one that achieves the fourfold objectives of ecological sustainability, economic democracy, social justice, and human well-being. 

Achieving these multiple objectives require a panoply of instruments and strategies. In Fitzpatrick et al. (2022), we identified 530 policy proposals in the degrowth literature, including 50 goals, 100 objectives, and 380 instruments. These are not unique to the growth-critical scholarship as most of these instruments actually come from outside of the field. What makes the concept of degrowth rather unique (and useful) is the way it patchworks these elements together around a new narrative at the confluence of several philosophies (anarchism, feminism, limitarianism, Marxism, anti-utilitarianism etc.) – for an attempt to synthetise the philosophical foundations of the concept, see “Chapter 6: Theoretical foundations” in The political economy of degrowth (2019).

Even though degrowth mobilises measures, objectives, and initiatives that one finds in other discourses, its defining trait is to illuminate practices that should be abandoned (e.g., fossil fuels, for-profit corporations, advertising). The focal point of degrowth is mainly – although not exclusively – to phase down or phase out socially unessential and ecologically unsustainable goods and services. That’s the first meaning of a degrowth policy: a targeted intervention to reduce production and consumption Certain policies like food social security, job guarantee, work sharing, and participatory budgets are mobilised to ensure that the road back within planetary boundaries remain democratic, just, and convivial. One could say that these are not degrowth policy per say (because they don’t directly aim at downscaling economic activities), but they are part of a more systemic strategy for change. 

What’s the strategy you may ask? Well, it’s not clear yet. The scholarship is slowly moving towards exploring this question, without much of a breakthrough so far.^[12] Most often, we growth-critical academics get stuck justifying objections to growth (e.g., the impossibility of green growth, the existence of an income-wellbeing upper threshold, among broader criticisms of capitalism), leaving little time to elaborate the contours of an alternative system and the pathways to get there.  

How to reconcile sufficiency and efficiency policies? 

In one of my talks (Solving the Rubik’s cube of sustainability, 2025), I try to show that efforts in the name of sufficiency and efforts in the name of efficiency could go side by side (it was a revamped version of my Avengers of sustainability analogy). Here is how the argument goes. According to the Avoid-Shift-Improve (ASI) framework, there are three ways of reducing an ecological footprint: doing less (acting on scale), doing different (acting on composition), and doing better (acting on efficiency). For instance, to reduce the environmental pressures of housing, we can build less dwellings (scale), favour apartments over individual houses (composition), and use less-impactful construction techniques and more sustainable materials (efficiency). 

The main point of the talk was twofold. First, the order of these steps matters. It makes sense to start by avoiding activities since the most renewable resource is the one we do not need. Doing less is the Holy Grail of an ecological transition. Easy, fast, and failsafe, it’s the lowest hanging fruit. However, it cannot be applied to everything, which brings me to step two. What cannot be avoided can be substituted, which requires finding more ecologically efficient ways of satisfying the same need. And finally, the third step: whatever cannot be avoided and substituted can be improved, either technically or institutionally. 

This is a chain of action from the fastest, most straightforward to the slowest, more uncertain. If you cancel a trip, then the full footprint of the trip disappears. It’s a bit like in the movie Minority Report (2002) where crimes are solved before they happen; minimalism prevents environmental harm before it even begins. If you cannot avoid the trip, you can perhaps favour less nature-intensive modes of transport, for example riding a train instead of driving. And if you can neither cancel the trip nor ditch the car, then it is best if you use a light electric car (technical improvement) shared among several households (institutional improvement). 

Any serious transition scenario should include these three steps of resolution (hence the analogy with a Rubik’s cube that can only be solved following a specific sequence of moves). The Avoid-Shift-Improve framing is modular, which allows for various combinations to fit sectors with different characteristics. For specific goods where less-polluting alternatives and better technologies are available, shift and improve policies can be very effective. Other challenges without foreseeable alternatives might, on the other hand, require scale policies. If you have a lot of shifting and improving with very little avoiding, the impact on GDP might still be positive. If you mostly rely on avoiding, you may end up with something closer to an actual degrowth.  

The second point of Solving the Rubik’s cube of sustainability (2025) was that each steps facilitates the following. For example, fewer travels (scale) make it’s easier to accommodate a modal shift, for example from flights to trains (composition), and the fewer trains makes it easier to upgrade and renew existing train infrastructure (efficiency). I won’t repeat myself here. It’s the precise same argument I developed earlier: from a biophysical accounting perspective, a smaller economy is much easier to fit within limited planetary boundaries than a growing one. 

***

This has been a heavily abstract journey. Let’s summarise the two claims I’ve made. First, the required actions to bring back high-income economies within planetary boundaries is very likely to contract their GDP. It is important to say it out loud because the implications for economic organisation are far reaching. Our current economic systems are not designed to function in the negative. We environmental and ecological economists must therefore urgently find concrete solutions on how to organise an economy that can prosper without growth, as Tim Jackson would say.

Luckily, a large part of current scholarly efforts in growth-critical studies are addressing this crucial question, and the contribution of Jonathan Aldred on consumption-reduction policies and rationing is, in that light, very valuable. 

The second point contrasts with the first. From an environmental policy perspective, we need to cool down the clash between degrowthers and green growthers. When it comes to daily changes in the real economy, these two sides have a lot in common (even though degrowth tackles a much larger panel of issues^[13]). To find the most effective way of reducing macroecological footprints, we need sufficiency and efficiency. Let’s therefore make sure to keep bridges open between different approaches.   

^[1] Here are the three recent pieces in The Guardian: “‘The trend is irreversible’: has Romania shattered the link between economic growth and high emissions?” (February 2026); “Economic growth is still heating the planet. Is there any way out?” (February 2026); “Economic growth no longer linked to carbon emissions in most of the world, study finds” (11 December 2025)

^[2] It’s even visible on the graph shown in The Guardian’s article: -27% emissions during 1990-1992, -19% during 1996-1999, -12% during 2008-2010, and -2,9 % during 2019-2020. 

^[3] The conclusion of a 2023 note from the Irish Department of Finance (p. 6) is worth quoting at length: “Over the period as a whole, GHG emissions reductions achieved through improvements in the carbon intensity of energy and in the energy intensity of economic growth are small relative to the continued and robust rise in the contributions from economic growth per capita and the increase in population. While a ‘relative decoupling’ has occurred over the last quarter-century, with the economy becoming relatively more energy and carbon efficient, an ‘absolute decoupling’ has not been achieved, with the result that emissions are still higher than in 1990.” 

^[4] Famously, even Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994) and his disciple Herman Daly (1938-2022) didn’t agree on this question. In the seminal The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), N. Georgescu-Roegen argued that the law of entropy meant that an economy would unavoidably face some kind of decline – one of the earliest occurrences of the term “décroissance” (degrowth) was actually a French translation of the selected works by Georgescu-Roegen in 1979 with the title “La décroissance. Entropie, Écologie, Économie” (Degrowth. Entropy, Ecology, Economy). Herman Daly (for an overview of his lifework, see Victor, 2022) disagreed with N. Georgescu-Roegen, which led to develop the concept of a “steady-state economy” (e.g., Daly, 1974). 

^[5] The IPAT equation first appeared in 1971, in a critique of Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971) written by Paul Ehrlich and John P. Holdren (for a history, see Holdren, 2018). 

^[6] See The political economy of degrowth (2019, Chapter 7, “Crowded? The denatalist critique, pp. 413-425). 

^[7] If the acceleration in technological progress seems reasonably reachable or if the yearly rate of degrowth seems rather mild, keep in mind that, (a) this is only for carbon, ignoring other planetary boundaries; (b) that we only counted territorial emissions – which is 20 % lower than the EU carbon footprint; (c) and that we uncritically adopted the European Commission’s -55% by 2030 target, which is much lower that what scientists recommend (close to -60 / -70 %). 

^[8] The author is aware of this, mentioning Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971): “human activity on Earth is ultimately subject to a range of material and energy limits. Eventually these limits must constrain GDP growth, because while GDP growth with low material throughput is possible, ongoing immaterial growth is not” (Aldred, 2026, p. 11). 

^[9] The idea of Gross National Product was born in the 1930s and internationalised in the 1950s (for historical accounts, see Philipsen, 2015 or Schmelzer, 2016). There have been five methodological revisions since (1960, 1964, 1968, 1993, and 2008) without major changes in the philosophy of the measure. Alternative indicators of wealth started developing in the 1970s with more than 200 hundreds of them existing today (Ríos-Ocampo et al., 2026), even though none of them have dethroned GDP. 

^[10] The convergence of the curves toward a steady, endless economic growth results from a specific assumption built into the model about long-term productivity gains, the variable driving growth. So, this graph should be taken with a pinch of salt; it’s only a quantitative visualisation of the assumption of that productivity gains increase continuously therefore leading to endless growth.

^[11] Here is the full quote from John Maynard Keynes’s 1942 BBC address, “Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income […] Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital […] an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. […] We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life?”

^[12] For example, the book Degrowth & Strategy: How to bring about social-ecological transformation (2022), “Chapter 4: Political Strategies for Degrowth” in Exploring degrowth: A Critical Guide (2020), “Chapter 5: Pathways to degrowth” in The future is degrowth (2022), a series of policy briefs coordinated by the organisation Research & Degrowth, and this timely article that came out in The Guardian (“We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate – here are the first three steps”) – for my own synthesis, see “Chapter 8: Strategies for change” in The political economy of degrowth (2019). More generally, see Fitzpatrick et al. (2025) for a survey of the strategies and tactics of degrowth academics and activists. 

^[13] Degrowthers have done an extensive work clarifying key positions in political economy concerning money (e.g., Olk et al., 2023), work (see Vincent and Brandellero, 2023 for a review), business models (e.g., Nesterova, 2020), among a variety of more detail topics like housing (Nelson and Schneider, 2019), tourism (Fletcher et al., 2020), food (Nelson and Edwards, 2021) – for a good overview of this literature, see Parrique, 2019; Kallis et al., 2018 and Kallis et al., 2025; Schmelzer et al., 2022. The green growth scholarship, on the other hand, is mostly empirical, very carbon focused, with little elaborations on its associated economic system (for an overview, see Khan et al., 2025). 

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I’ve just finished Growth: A Reckoning (2023) by Daniel Susskind. Professor of business at Gresham College in London, he’s a skilful writer and anyone interested in the study of economic growth should enjoy this book. There is much to comment, but to remain within my area of expertise, I’ll only analyse his take on degrowth, a topic he addresses specifically in Chapter 7: Degrowth and more sporadically throughout the book. The author raises five questions that are good departure points for a constructive dialogue: Is degrowth unclear? Is infinite growth possible on a finite planet? Is degrowth a recession with a human face? Does degrowth lacks imagination? And is degrowth politically impossible? 

Is degrowth unclear? 

Daniel Susskind finds degrowth unclear. “In truth, what the degrowth movement actually stands for is not clear. Its literature is large, fast-growing and fascinating. But it is also contradictory and hard to follow, written in the clashing terminology of different disciplines, obscured by academese, inflated with political rhetoric and full of distracting disagreements between partisan thinkers with diverging personal motivations” (p. 150). 

It’s harsh but it’s partly true. The degrowth scholarship^[1] might be a treasure trove of useful concepts but it’s messy and, at time, unnecessarily esoteric. As of now, and after 20 years of existence, there is still no widely accepted definition of the term (even though the one in Schneider et al., 2010^[2] is perhaps the most popular). The disagreement is not that much about the essence of the idea, which is rather consistent throughout the literature, but rather about finding one short and simple way to encapsulate all the diverse meanings behind the term. A few people argue that the concept is too complex to be defined but I don’t find that argument convincing. Degrowth is not more difficult to define than the happiness of philosophers, the democracy of political scientists, or the space-time of physicists. 

In its contemporary usage, the term degrowth has three dimensions: a critical theory, a transition strategy, and a utopia. To avoid unnecessary confusion, let’s use different concepts for each: objection to growth (the critique), degrowth (the transition), and post-growth (the utopia). There are different strands of objections to growth (Schmelzer, 2022), but they all have in common that they take the critique of economic growth as a theoretical starting point. That’s pretty straightforward. The two other terms, however, are a bit more sophisticated. In Slow down or die (2025), I define degrowth as “a downscaling of production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints, planned democratically in a way that is equitable while securing wellbeing” (for more details, see Defining degrowth, 2025). In the same book, I offer a similar, five-point definition for post-growth: “a steady-state in harmony with nature where decisions are made collectively and wealth is equitably shared, allowing us to prosper without growth” 

So, one could say that degrowth stands for at least three things. First, a deconstruction of the hegemony of economic growth in modern politics – that’s close to the “weak degrowth” and “GDP minimalism” approach embraced by Daniel Susskind (see Ch. 6 and 7). The second calls for something concrete: a planned slowdown of production and consumption for countries in ecological overshoot. The final demand has to do with the destination. Degrowth is a post-capitalist theory in the sense that it envisions an alternative economic system with radically different features (not-for-profit cooperatives, local currencies, commons, low-tech and convivial technologies, reduced working time, participatory decision-making protocols, etc.). 

These three tactical angles share the same set of values. In Chapter 6 of my PhD thesis The political economy of degrowth (2019), I tried to capture the essence of degrowth in three values (autonomy, sufficiency, and care), which I operationalised into 15 principles of organisation.^[3] In The future is degrowth (2022), one of my favourite synthesis of the literature, the authors decompose degrowth into six different typologies: 3 dimensions, 7 critiques of growth, 5 currents, 3 principles, 6 clusters of proposals, and 3 strategies for change (for a summary, see Parrique, 2022). There are a handful of other theories of degrowth^[4]; the typologies are not exactly the same but the content pretty much is.   

Infinite growth on a finite planet? 

The green growth versus degrowth debate has two levels. The first is rather practical; it deals with the conditions that would allow countries in ecological overshoot to get back within planetary boundaries in the short term. The other debate is more long term and theoretical; it has to do with whether or not it’s possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet. 

The first mistake Daniel Susskind makes is to confuse the two. “Given the extraordinary technological changes that are underway, and the indeterminacy of what lies ahead, it feels deeply parochial to think that the last fifty years are likely to be a good guide to the next fifty thousand” (p. 222).^[5] Arguing that degrowth is unnecessary today because green growth is theoretically possible would be like a doctor telling a sick patient that they don’t need to stop smoking because some people can smoke without getting cancer. Perhaps some do but that argument is irrelevant to someone with cancerous lungs. 

As the latest Planetary Health Check (2025, p. 11) concludes: “seven out of nine Planetary Boundaries have been breached, with all of those seven showing trends of increasing pressure – suggesting further deterioration and destabilization of planetary health in the near future.” Another study that came out yesterday gives similar warnings: “the ten ecological indicators with available time-series data show a considerable worsening of conditions since the early 2000s. […] The median level of overshoot beyond the ecological ceiling increases from 75 % in 2000 to 96 % in 2022” (Fanning and Raworth, 2025, p. 2, see figure below). In case you didn’t get the analogy, these are our cancerous lungs. 

“What if ten thousand years from now, for instance, our current physical world sits alongside trillions of virtual worlds, each of them full of simulated human minds, each with a virtual economy producing vast amounts of output” (p. 261). This makes for a good science-fiction scenario but it has little relevance today. Currently, no country in the world manages to achieve decent living standards without overshooting its planetary boundaries (Fanning et al., 2022; O’Neill, 2018) and no country has ever managed to decrease its total ecological footprint while growing its economy. That’s the reality we should be concerned about. If a doctor diagnoses you with lung cancer, I doubt that the hypothetical possibility of 3D-printed organs being developed in 10 000 years will have an impact on your thinking and actions in the present. 

Daniel Susskind calls for a “great decoupling” through a “renewable revolution” (Ch. 10), taking the example of solar energy. According to him, appropriate policies (“taxes and subsidies, laws and regulations, social narratives and norms” like a carbon tax^[6]) could “spread incentives that redirect technological progress, pushing it away from dirty technologies towards cleaner ones” (p. 240). First, it’s a common mistake to think that greening electricity is enough to make the global economy sustainable. Electricity only accounts for 20 % of global final energy consumption, the rest being mostly oil, gas, and coal (even in a highly electrified country like France, it’s below 30 %). Besides, cheaper solar energy is no guarantee of phasing out fossil fuels – for more, see Brett Christophers’s The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet (2022) and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2025).

In less than a page, Daniel Susskind goes from a small, specific fact (the price of solar panels is decreasing) to a general, all-encompassing claim (it’s possible to have “more growth in a healthier environmental at the same time,” p. 240). A classic case of faulty generalisation. Cheaper solar panels are not going to preserve biodiversity, avoid microplastic and antibiotic pollution, or halt deforestation. And it remains to be shown that the trends observed for solar energy – granted they’re sufficiently fast and impactful – could happen for every single other relevant technology. 

Like 99 % of economists who take a position on this debate, Daniel Susskind only talks about greenhouse gas emissions. This happens so often that it now has a name: “carbon tunnel vision.” But let’s not forget that we are dealing with a polycrisis with at least 9 planetary boundaries^[7] and many more Earth system “tipping points.” Dumbing down that complex problem into a one-dimensional puzzle is like solving only one face of Rubik’s Cube – easier, yes, but not a proper solution. Worse, non-systemic actions to cut emissions can mess up other faces of the cube. For instance, if we were to electrify our car fleet in its current scale, we would lower our carbon footprint but increase our material footprint (since electric vehicles require 2.3 time more minerals than conventional cars). 

Even the part on carbon is unconvincing. Reproducing part of a 2021 figure from the online blog Our World in Data (see the full figure below), he hints at 25 countries who have supposedly reduced their emissions between 2005 and 2019 while increasing their GDP. This is a figure I have often debunked (e.g., 1, 2, 3). Without repeating myself here, let’s just say that there is a problem of insufficient evidence. The decoupling debate spans over 30 years of literature and more than 1,000 empirical studies. If the only proof one can find is an old blog post, it says a lot about the solidity of the argument.  

In theory, I can imagine an economy running at carbon neutrality. Stop burning oil, gas, and coal, get rid of cows, reforest, and just power your economy with renewables. Yet, I cannot see how we could produce forever more while using forever less soil, water, biomass, metals, materials, and ecosystem services and while generating forever less chemical pollution, micro-plastics, nuclear waste, deforestation, and species extinction. That’s where I stand on the theoretical debate: I haven’t found any convincing theory showing that green growth is possible without resorting to the joker card of technological progress (for more, see A response to Noah Smith, 2021). 

Here, someone might object that the past doesn’t define the future. But that statement doesn’t hold much water when your deadline is only 5 or 10 years ahead. Not even the wildest engineer would dare predict a carbon-free commercial plane being invented before 2030, even less brought to market and actively used in replacement of all of today’s planes (which, for the reminder, stay 20 to 25 years in use before retirement). The timing just doesn’t work. If you want to cut the emission of aviation before 2030, you have no choice but to flight less. If you think this is an extreme example, look at these numbers. To get back within planetary boundaries before 2050, we need to reduce global emissions by -3.4% per year but, historically, they have been increasing by a yearly +3.1% between 2000 and 2022 –  and achieving this U-turn seems relatively easy compared to other, more extreme trends (see table below). 

What troubles me most in Growth: A Reckoning is that the whole argument rests on faith in technological progress. “The infinite universe of ideas allows us to sidestep the constraints imposed by a finite planet” (p. 158).^[8] That makes for a good mug quote but this is an incredibly risky strategy. Daniel Susskind has a spot-on analogy, comparing exponential growth to “the moment when the pilot of an interstellar spacecraft decides to engage ‘hyperdrive’ and an anxiety descends on the crew as they realize the slightest mistake at ‘warp speed’ could tear the craft to pieces” (p. 221). This is precisely what’s happening today. The “great acceleration” in production of the last century (in short: economic growth) is tearing the planet into pieces and it’s becoming more and more difficult to slalom between the asteroids. 

Let’s end on a point of agreement (I will repeat here what I already argued in A response to Hannah Ritchie, 2024). The resource-cutting measures advocated in the name of green growth are more likely to be effective in a smaller, non-growing economy compared to a situation where levels of production and consumption constantly increase. This is well explained in the “Decoupling environmental degradation from economic growth,” a chapter of Reboot Development (2025, pp. 19-32), the latest report on sustainability from the World Bank. 

To lower an environmental footprint, you can act on scale (the volume of production and consumption), on composition (the type of goods and services), and on efficiency (the ecological intensity of these products). As the graph below shows (for both greenhouse gas – GHG – emissions and fine particulate matter – PM_2.5), the scale effect (economic growth) pushes emissions up while the composition and efficiency effects pull them down. In high-income countries (HICs), the two forces almost cancel each other, which explains why the decrease in emissions is so small. 

What degrowth tries to do is to harness the power of scale (in addition to composition and efficiency) in order to cut emissions much faster. Usually, it’s at this moment in the discussion that opponents concede that, indeed, degrowth is a fast, fail-safe way of lowering an environmental footprint, but that it doesn’t matter because it’s socially undesirable. 

A recession with a human face? 

“[I]t is unfortunate that the degrowthers are so defensive when people say that they are calling for deliberate recessions. As a matter of public relations, that reaction is understandable. But there is also something disappointing about it, because their call for recessions in fact captures the uniqueness of what they are trying to do” (p. 169). I think that’s a valuable communication tip. As I argue in Defining degrowth (2025), the unavoidable core of degrowth is a downscaling of economic activities. 

If you cannot sufficiently decouple GDP from environmental pressures and if you want to achieve a large reduction in ecological footprints, then it means that your economy has to contract. There is no way out of it. You might call it a slowdown, a contraction, or a recession and add as many reassuring adjectives to it as you want, but you cannot escape from the fact that your economy – both in monetary and biophysical terms – will get smaller. “[T]he term ‘recession’ is just the technical label for a period where economic activity declines, nothing more or less,” explains Daniel Susskind. “It has nothing to do with any other features – good outcomes, noble intentions – that might or might not accompany an economic downturn” (p. 161). 

But that does not mean that degrowth is only a recession. One shortcoming of this debate is that it’s too black and white: growth good / degrowth bad (or the opposite, depending on your ideological position). However, growth is an aggregated, macroeconomic phenomenon, and there more desirable kinds of growth than others. What applies in pluses also applies in minuses. Certain recessions are worse than others and degrowth is a concept that describes a hypothetical recession with social ecological benefits.

This is why I like the analogy of a macroeconomic diet to get back into ecological health. In my definition of degrowth, I decided to use the term “downscaling,” which is more precise term than “reduction,” “contraction,” or “shrinking” because it implies that the goal is to fall back under a certain threshold, what the ecological economist Herman Daly compared to a plimsoll line, the reference mark on a ship’s hull indicating the maximum depth to which a boat can be safely submersed. Daniel Susskind should appreciate the maritime analogy since he himself uses it: “picture the economy as a boat bobbing about on the open water, with policymakers at the helm. They can raise the sails to speed up, or lower them to slow down […] but they can also steer their craft wherever they please on the sea” (p. 208). The two metaphors work well together. A boat (an economy) can go anywhere (in terms of what it can produce and consume) except if it sinks (by overshooting the biocapacity of its ecosystems leading to their collapse).

One could say that degrowth is a preventive, controlled recession in order to avoid another, more damaging and chaotic crash. It’s akin to throwing a few furniture overboard to avoid sinking the ship. We now know that the collapse of ecosystems will have significant consequences on economic activities. A recent study estimates that the costs of already-incurring climate change will eat up 19 % of global GDP in the next 26 years, which is six times more than what it would have costed to avoid such a warming. This is now a consensual claim: the costs of action are lower than the costs of inaction. 

Degrowth is “akin to driving down a road, knocking over an animal, and reversing back over the corpse to try and fix the problem” (p. 248), writes Daniel Susskind. But I don’t think the analogy works. The way I see it, degrowth is just a prudent slowdown in order to avoid running over nature. And to be exact, one should add “before nature runs over us,” because that’s the real threat. The 2008 financial meltdown, the Greek debt crisis, the Covid lockdown, all of that will be considered cute and fun the day water will run out, insects will cease to pollinate our crops, and temperatures will reach killer heat. 

Better slower by design than by disaster, would say Canadian macroeconomist Peter Victor. The challenge is to find a way of contracting the economy without crashing it. Worktime reduction schemes and job guarantees to avoid unemployment, fiscal reforms to weaken growth dependencies, monetary reforms to finance the transition, redistributive mechanisms to keep inequality in check, these are examples of degrowth policies, proposals that could enable a smooth slowdown (or at least smoother compared to a situation without any prior planning).  

Forget about GDP. What really matters is that the foundational economy remains intact. What we economists should care about is that energy, materials, adequate labour, and social-ecological infrastructure remain available in order to provide for human needs. In that sense, avoiding ecological collapse is a necessary step to maintain a functioning provisioning system. In Chapter 4: The promise, Daniel Susskind makes an inventory of all the “dazzling range of measures of wellbeing and progress” growth appears to be correlated with. He mentions health, education, leisure time, tax revenues, and lighting (yeah, that last one comes a bit out of nowhere). Point is: all of these things will be more difficult to achieve in a world crippled with environmental crises. 

Degrowth might be difficult but there is one element that makes it much easier than it could potentially be: it mainly concerns already-rich nations. Indeed, to be effective, the slowdown should happen in regions with large overshoot, which happens to be mostly high-income countries (see, for example, Fanning et al., 2022). In a highly unequal world where poverty remains (Fanning and Raworth, 2025), these are places where growth is the least needed. Daniel Susskind tries to show – in less than five paragraphs (pp. 86-88) – that “the conventional wisdom that growth does not make us happier is probably wrong.” But, like in the case of decoupling, he doesn’t provide sufficient evidence to back-up his claim. In fact, he only references four studies from 2008, 2012, and 2013, three of them by the same pair of authors. In such a booming and disputed field of research, this looks like suspicious cherry-picking, especially when studies have recently moved from a sole concern on life satisfaction (like in the original Easterlin study in 1974) to more complex ranges of indicators of quality of life.^[9]

And let’s forget about income for a second. Can you think of a single need that is not bounded by a threshold of satiation? You need enough medicine when you get sick, enough teachers to obtain a decent education, enough floor space to feel comfortable at home, etc. If the raison d’être of an economy is to satisfy needs, and if these needs are bounded, then one should expect an economy to slow down as it reaches maturity. You need bullets during a war and masks during a pandemic, but there is no point aiming for a steady 2% yearly growth of them forever. The economy is a mean, not an end. And in that sense, an economy can indeed be “fully grown” with stagnation being a sign of success. 

A lack of imagination? 

“One of the degrowth’s movement most frustrating characteristics,” writes Daniel Susskind is “its lack of imagination” (p. 165). This is a strange argument and, to understand why, allow me a little personal detour. Before getting interested in sustainability, I studied economics. Very quickly, I got interested in political economy, economic history, and the history of economic thought, fields I found much more intellectually stimulating than modern micro- and macroeconomics. 

Reading outside-of-the-curriculum authors like Alessandro Roncaglia, Marshall Sahlins, Fernand Braudel, or David Graeber, I got a taste of how creative human societies can be in the ways they organise economic life. I still remember how shocked (and disappointed) I was during my first course in Comparative Political Economy where a professor presented us a triad supposedly encompassing all possible economic systems: capitalism, socialism, or developing countries who have not yet chosen between the two. 

Let’s say it out loud: economics is experiencing a failure of collective imagination. I borrow the term from a group of economists at the London School of Economics who, in 2009, had to justify themselves to the Queen after she asked why no one had seen the financial crisis coming. The experts’ response: “The failure to foresee the timing, scale, and severity of the crisis and to prevent it, although it has many causes, is mainly due to the failure of the collective imagination of many brilliant people, both in this country and abroad, to understand the risks to the system as a whole” (italics added).  

There are many brilliant researchers, each specializing in their own field of study, but few are able to think about the system as a whole. The metaphor of the blind zoologists and the elephant becomes the one of economists and the economy: each touches a single part without being able to define the whole. Not only does this makes us unable to predict systemic crises but it also prevents us from imagining economic systems that are radically different from the one we already have. 

I divide my time between reading traditional economics and growth-critical theories and the difference is striking. While environmental economists keep discussing the carbon tax, the one single innovation that came out of the field since the 1970s, heterodox scholars have been inventing a diversity of never-heard-before solutions: commoning, alternative monies, defashion, universal care income, ecological transition income, universal basic services, local job guarantee, not-for-profit businesses, etc. The degrowth literature has many flaws but a lack of imagination is not one of them.    

“The result is an oddly conservative view of the future: they [advocates of degrowth] seem happy to settle for the familiar mediocrity of the world we happen to have inherited, resign ourselves to indefinitely shuffling around our present economic lot rather than reach for the unfamiliar but extraordinary possibilities that lies in wait” (p. 165). In his book Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care (2019, p. 3), the degrowth theorist Giorgos Kallis gives the perfect answer to this argument, using a quote from the film The Legend of 1900 (1998): “The keys begin, the keys end. You know there are 88 of them. They are not infinite, you are infinite. On those 88 keys the music that you can make is infinite.” Would you call modern pianists like Martha Argerich or Jacob Collier “conservative” because they still play on an 88-key piano, an object they “happen to have inherited” from the past? Of course not. Contemporary pianists don’t “resign themselves to indefinitely shuffling around” with 88 keys, they are, on the contrary, using the limitedness of the keys to deploy their creativity. Adding an 89^th key to a piano is not innovation, it is the very opposite: a cheap technical fix to make up for a lack of musical imagination. 

As an environmentally grounded theory, degrowth acknowledges the existence of biophysical limits. But this finitude must not necessarily translate into social stagnation. It is precisely because natural resources are limited that we must show creativity in the way we use them. Bizarre ideas like energy-backed currencies, frequent flyer levies, or food social security should be considered tremendous feat of imagination at a time where it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The lazy solution of mining asteroids to get more materials to continue growing as usual is just like adding an 89^th key to a piano.  

After reading such a critique, I was eagerly waiting for the author’s own creative solution to the problem. It came at the end of the book: “we can shape the direction of technological progress, and with it change the nature of economic growth” (p. 225). Daniel Susskind wants to do that with “taxes and subsidies, laws and regulations, social narratives and norms” (a catchphrase he incants throughout the book, unfortunately without ever getting into too much details).^[10] For ecological sustainability, the only thing he offers is – surprise surprise – a carbon tax, which he considers “and obvious starting point – and if large enough, possible ending point” (p. 241). All of that teasing just to say – or rather, repeat – that one must ‘internalise externalities’^[11] to harness the power of technological progress? 

That’s disappointing. Daniel Susskind doesn’t offer a solution; he just says that we should be working harder on finding solutions (his definition of technological progress). This is like trying to lose weight by writing more nutrition books. Is this not, after all, the ultimate resignation? Just passing the ball to future generations hoping they’ll do better than us. This sounds like a cop out. If, like Daniel Susskind, we believe in the “innovative genius of humankind” (p. 272), why not just using it right now? We’re humans, we can have ideas now, and some of them (like degrowth) are more powerful than we think. 

Is degrowth impossible? 

Degrowth “would be impossible to achieve in the real world” (p. 166), affirms Daniel Susskind. There is a grain of truth here. I cannot think of many places where a politician would get elected championing degrowth. To be fair, the problem is not about degrowth per se but rather about the unpopularity of ecology in general. Nowadays, any candidate putting sustainability first is likely to be cancelled.

Luckily, there is a life beyond statecraft. What we should pay attention to are the many initiatives of “degrowth in practice” (see, for example, Ch. 3 in Exploring degrowth), “the diverse ways activists have pursued degrowth by living simply; experimenting with alternative technologies and techniques for living and self-provisioning; forming political squats and social centres; campaigning against mega-infrastructure developments; experimenting with alternative currencies and non-monetary economies; developing action-based experiential methods and methodologies.” 

Degrowth sounds impossible as a grand project until you decompose it into smaller actions. Giving up meat, closing down an airport, banning adverting, taxing extreme wealth, criminalising planned obsolescence, launching local currencies, organising citizen assemblies, setting up not-for-profit cooperatives, etc. (for a full list, see Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). This is not science-fiction. All of these things exist today and what is being explored in the degrowth literature is a scenario where many of them would be actioned together, with or without the support of the state.  

Back in 2019, I titled the conclusion of the policy design part of my PhD thesis “a realistic demand for the impossible,” arguing that degrowth was a constructive utopia, an impossible goal worth having because it broadens the window of possibility.^[12] Degrowth is what Martin Luther King called “creative maladjustment,” a refusal to adjust to a reality one finds absurd. And this is precisely the task that falls upon us: turning the inconceivable of today into the commonsense of tomorrow. 

“If Jesus himself could not convince everyone to give up their material possessions – in the words of Matthew 19:24, ‘Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God’ – then it is unlikely that degrowthers will be able to do it either” (p. 167). Inequality is a good example of the impossible turning possible. Rewind a century or two, and the idea of economic equality was as utopian as it gets (in fact, the term “utopia” was created in 1516 when Thomas More envisioned a society without inequality). Today in France, redistributive mechanisms manage to narrow down inequality in living standards from a ratio of 1-to-18 before redistribution to a ratio of only 1-to-3. This is a spectacular story of social innovation (and no, economic growth has nothing to do with it). 

In social systems, the notion of impossibility can quickly shift. For a long time, it was considered impossible for a central bank to inject money into the economy. But in 2001, the Bank of Japan started doing so and, today, quantitative easing has become a mainstream policy tool. Excluding certain public spendings from the Maastricht debt was for long considered impossible. But with the return of war in Europe, an exception is being made for defence expenditures. 

Daniel Susskind mentions the Covid crisis several times in the book, which he sees as an example of rapid technological progress (he speaks about the development of vaccines). I feel the same but about social innovation instead. Many things impossible became possible during the pandemic: lockdowns, rationing of medical equipment, wearing masks in public, etc. What we discovered during Covid is that, when it comes to social organisation, pretty much anything is possible (for better or for worse). So, why are we not applying the same ambition to tackling ecological crises? 

Let’s get back to the smoking analogy. Here is the choice we have. We can try to quit smoking (that’s degrowth). This is impossible in a hyperbolic sense; we could do it but it’s extremely difficult, and therefore rather unlikely. Or we can hope for a technical solution that might never materialise (that’s green growth). In choosing between the two, I think we should side for the most probable impossible. 

***

“The pursuit of growth is a new, mysterious and dangerous activity for humankind,” concludes Daniel Susskind (p. 270). He’s right and I think Growth: A Reckoning (2023) is successful in showing how little we know about the nature and causes of economic growth. What I find troubling in his attitude is how little proof he brings to back-up some of his claims. Green growth is happening because one figure on a blog post says so and it will continue forever because solar panels are getting cheaper. The Easterlin paradox is wrong because two authors in 2008 said it was. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and, unfortunately, this book is full of the former but scarce of the latter. Given the gravity of the present situation, we should be very careful about what we think we know about growth. if I’m wrong about degrowth, then you can kick-start the economy back again to continue growing business-as-usual. If Daniel Susskind is wrong, on the other hand, it will cost us the biosphere. 

^[1] To discover the growth-critical scholarship, I recommend these two review articles (Kallis et al., 2025; Kallis et al., 2019), the book The future is degrowth (2022), or my PhD thesis The political economy of degrowth (2019) and its adaptation in book format as Slow down or die. The economics of degrowth (2025). 

^[2] “An equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long-term [and which is] offered as a social choice, not imposed as an external imperative for environmental or other reasons.” (Schneider et al., 2010, pp. 512-13)

^[3] The 15 principles are: resource sovereignty, sustainability, circularity, socially useful production, small not-for-profit cooperatives, proximity, convivial tools, postwork, value sovereignty, commons, gratuity, sharing, voluntary simplicity, relational goods, and joie de vivre (see The political economy of degrowth, 2019, pp. 272-315).

^[4] For example, Latouche, 2006; Flipo, 2007; Demaria et al., 2013; Lievens, 2015; Kallis, 2018: 118-123; Abraham, 2019; Parrique, 2019: Chap 6 – for a review of different theories of degrowth, see Parrique (2019, pp. 237-244).

^[5] Daniel Susskind uses this joker twice. Not only can technological progress infinitely increase general productivity but it also applies to the productivity of the researchers themselves. “[T]he productivity of researchers – like the productivity of any worker – can vary. And most importantly, there is no theoretical limit to how productive a researcher could be in the future, how quickly they might be able to come up with more ideas in the centuries to come” (p. 195). Technological progress applies to itself which ensures an infinite loop of exponential improvement. 

^[6] For the author, a carbon tax would be “an obvious starting point – and if large enough, a possible ending point” (p. 241).

^[7] Here are the nine planetary boundaries: Ozone depletion, aerosol loading, ocean acidification, freshwater change, land system change, climate change, modification of biogeochemical flows like phosphorus and nitrogen, introduction of novel entities, and change in biosphere integrity. 

^[8] “The planet of tangible resources may be finite, and if these resources were all that counted for growth then we would indeed be heading towards deep economic trouble. But they are not all that matters. In fact, what really matters for growth are the intangible ideas for combining these resources in new and valuable ways” (p. 157). 

^[9] Two examples of recent studies on the link between income and well-being: Fanning et O’Neill (2019) and Steinberger et al. (2020). See also Fanning and Raworth (2025) for a sophisticated set of wellbeing indicators. 

^[10] The author offers four solutions to generate more growth: (1) changing intellectual property regime, (2) investing more in research and development, (3) encouraging immigration and reducing inequality of opportunities, and (4) developing more technologies (like computers that could semi-autonomously do research). In short: “improvements in the IP regime and more resources, people and technology devoted to R&D” (p. 202). 

^[11] “Prices must be influenced (at times gently nudged, at other times forcefully cajoled) to close the gap between the market value they capture when left to their own devices and the social value they neglect” (p. 218).

^[12] “Is degrowth unrealistic? Yes, it is and it should be. Simply put, if it is considered possible, then it is not degrowth. If it were to sound even remotely possible to the broader public, then it would probably be the sign that it is not revolutionary enough. Of course, it is not actually impossible, as the diversity of alternative practices that I have presented attest, but only appears to be so. Impossibility is the defining mark of all utopias. Degrowthers can be called utopian only because they explore the borders of the unimaginable. They think and act as if it was possible for degrowth to exist and through opposition and brave leaps of social eccentricity, they create the conditions of its own feasibility. Degrowth is, in that sense, an impossible goal but an impossible goal worth having” (The political economy of degrowth, 2019, p. 698).

Je n’aurais jamais pensé écrire une réponse à Serge Latouche, l’un des pionniers de la décroissance.^[1] Et pourtant, cela me parait nécessaire tant ses propos envers les degrowth studies sont problématiques.^[2] Celui que l’on surnomme « le pape de la décroissance » n’aime pas la littérature anglophone (assez paradoxal d’ailleurs pour quelqu’un qui ne lit presque pas l’anglais). Un « recyclage médiatique » par des « universitaires opportunistes », un « vocable globish discutable » par des jeunes qui « n’ont pas la radicalité de la décroissance » et qui inventent des « monstruosité conceptuelles ». Dans son dernier texte, je suis personnellement attaqué, décrit comme un « rénovateur de la seconde génération », un économiste à la pensée étroite cherchant la célébrité en dénaturant la décroissance. Si le titre de son dernier texte prend la forme d’une question (« Transmission, triomphe ou trahison ? »), il semblerait que nous ayons affaire à la dernière. Le jeune Anakin Skywalker que j’étais il y a quelques années est-il devenu le Dark Vador de la décroissance ? 

Quoi, combien, et comment ?

Comme beaucoup, j’ai découvert la décroissance en lisant Serge Latouche. Même si je m’apprête à les critiquer, il faut reconnaître à quel point ses contributions ont été fondamentales. Cela dit, je n’ai jamais été pleinement satisfait par ses ouvrages sur la décroissance, que je trouve moins rigoureux que ses travaux antérieurs. Je pense que c’est parce qu’ils manquent de précision. Plutôt que de m’attarder sur sa dernière tribune, je vais ici développer une critique plus générale de son travail en pointant trois limites liées au quoi, au combien, et au comment de la décroissance. 

La question du quoi 

Dans l’article Defining degrowth (2025), j’ai analysé 115 définitions de la décroissance, toutes celles que j’ai trouvé dans la littérature anglophone et francophone. Il n’y en a aucune de Latouche. Pourquoi ? Car, malgré ses nombreux textes sur le sujet, il n’a jamais vraiment défini le terme. L’excuse comme quoi le concept serait trop complexe n’est pas convaincante. La décroissance serait-elle plus difficile à définir que le bonheur des philosophes, le démocratie des politistes, ou l’espace-temps des physiciens ? Bien sûr que non.

Serge Latouche serpente autour du terme. Ce ne serait pas un concept mais « un slogan politique à implications théoriques » (2006 : p. 16) ; « la décroissance n’est pas vraiment une alternative concrète, mais plutôt la matrice autorisant un foisonnement d’alternatives » (2006 : p. 149) ; « la décroissance est une fiction performative, c’est-à-dire une utopie concrète, ou encore un projet de construction d’une société d’abondance frugale » (2011 : Introduction). C’est l’une des raisons pour laquelle je ne recommande pas ses travaux à des néophytes : la pensée est y souvent nébuleuse.

Impossible d’étudier quelque chose que l’on ne peut pas définir. Le flou conceptuel est peut-être une étape inévitable dans le développement de toute nouvelle théorie, mais vieille de plus de 20 ans, la décroissance ne peut plus jouer cette carte joker. Il existe d’ailleurs plusieurs bonnes définitions, à commencer par l’une des plus anciennes, celle qui émergea de la première conférence académique sur le sujet à Paris en 2008 : « An equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level, in the short and long-term [and which is] offered as a social choice, not imposed as an external imperative for environmental or other reasons » (Schneider et al., 2010: 512-13). 

Dans son dernier article, il me reproche de définir la décroissance comme une « économie stationnaire en harmonie avec la nature ». Une critique bien mal informée car, dans tous mes écrits, je défini toujours la décroissance comme une « réduction de la production et de la consommation pour alléger l’empreinte écologique planifiée démocratiquement dans un esprit de justice sociale et dans le souci du bien-être » (Ralentir ou périr, p. 15).^[3] Dans Defining degrowth (2025), je viens justifier et élaborer chacun des éléments de cette définition (contraction + soutenabilité + démocratie + justice + bien-être), en parvenant à montrer qu’ils sont assez consensuels dans la littérature. 

C’est peut-être mon côté universitaire, mais j’aime les théories bien rangées. Ces dernières années, certains spécialistes de la décroissance ont eu tendance à élargir le concept. Buch-Hansen et Nesterova (2023), par exemple, associent la décroissance à une longue liste de choses souhaitables allant de la réduction de la cupidité, de l’homophobie et de la bureaucratie à l’augmentation de la gentillesse, de la créativité et du respect des limites planétaires. Je trouve ces éléments trop vagues (et trop nombreux) pour constituer une définition opérationnelle. 

Au lieu de traiter la décroissance comme un terme destiné à rassembler le plus de choses possible, j’ai fait le choix d’élaborer une définition minimaliste qui capturerait ses caractéristiques essentielles. Qu’y a-t-il d’unique à propos de la décroissance que l’on ne retrouve pas déjà dans l’éco-socialisme, le buen vivir, ou la sobriété heureuse ? Plutôt que des accusations vagues sur ma posture (nous y reviendrons), je préfèrerais savoir ce que pense Serge Latouche de cette définition – ou encore mieux, d’entendre sa propre définition, qui sera peut-être même plus efficace que la mienne. 

La question du combien 

Deuxième limite des travaux de Serge Latouche sur la décroissance : il ne précise jamais vraiment l’ampleur du phénomène.^[4]L’auteur fait souvent référence à un retour aux niveaux de production de la France des années 1960. En effet, quand on regarde les chiffres du Global Footprint Network qui remontent jusqu’en 1961, c’est à ce moment-là que l’empreinte écologique française était la plus soutenable (l’équivalent de 1,4 planètes selon la méthode de l’universalisation des modes de vie). Le PIB français était de 487 milliards d’euros en 1961, soit environ cinq fois inférieur au niveau actuel. Un retour à ces niveaux de production se traduirait donc par une contraction de 80 %.

Serge Latouche voit les économistes comme des obsédés du PIB, considérant comme blasphématoire toute estimation quantitative de la décroissance. Je trouve cette position intenable. Ça serait comme un médecin qui vous annonce que vous devez faire un régime sans vous dire combien de kilos vous devriez perdre. C’est d’ailleurs l’un des reproches souvent faits aux décroissants.^[5] À la limite, si Serge Latouche défendait qu’il ne fallait pas estimer l’ampleur de la décroissance, pourquoi pas ; j’aurais considéré ça un chouïa anti-scientifique mais au moins, le propos aurait été cohérent. Mais non, il dit qu’il ne faut pas le faire et, paradoxalement, le fait, mais mal. 

Il n’est pourtant pas si difficile d’étudier les implications économiques de la décroissance. Il existe dans la littérature académique plusieurs estimations, chacune utilisant des méthodes différentes : -22% pour l’Allemagne d’ici 2033 dans Gran (2017 : p. 358), -50% pour la France d’ici 2050 dans Briens (2016 : p. 277), -65% pour la France dans Germain (2025), jusqu’à -0,7 % par an pour D’Alessandro et al. (2020) en France, -5,3% par an pour l’Australie dans Kikstra et al. (2024), -2,3 % par an pour la Chine dans Li (2023), et entre -1 % et -2 % par an pour les pays de l’UE dans Cuny et Parrique (2024). Ces chiffres ne nous montrent qu’un aspect du phénomène, mais il parait difficile de parler sérieusement de décroissance sans pouvoir annoncer si l’on parle d’une baisse de 0,1 %, de 1 %, ou de 10 %. 

Serge Latouche préfère parler de « luttes plus concrètes : contre les grands travaux inutiles, contre la surpêche, contre les pesticides, contre les méga bassines, contre le nucléaire, etc. ». Très bien. Mais là aussi, encore faut-il définir quels projets exactement sont considérés comme inutile, le seuil à partir duquel la pêche devient insoutenable, les produits chimiques qui devraient être interdits à la vente, etc. Avec une liste précise, on peut faire des scénario pour calculer si toutes ces actions feraient suffisamment baisser l’empreinte écologique totale d’un pays. Sans cela, ces listes restent des inventaires idéologiques difficiles à justifier.  

Rien de révolutionnaire, c’est l’approche de la prospective que l’on retrouve dans les travaux de l’Ademe, de NégaWatt, de RTE, ou du Shift. Le scénario « Génération frugale » de l’Ademe, par exemple, prévoit d’ici 2050 une division par trois de la consommation de viande, une baisse de 26 % des kilomètres parcourus, un rétrécissement de 30 % de la surface moyenne des maisons neuves, ainsi que d’autres changements menant à une baisse de la demande finale énergétique de 55 % par rapport à 2015. On peut faire des calculs en euros ou avec d’autres mesures non-monétaires, mais il est tout à fait possible d’élaborer des scénarios de transition précis, même quand on parle de décroissance. Ces exercices de modélisation ont leurs limites et les résultats sont toujours à prendre avec des pincettes, mais ils ont l’avantage de nous forcer à formuler de manière précise les transformations que l’on aimerait voir advenir. 

J’ai une technique rapide pour estimer l’ampleur de la décroissance dans un pays donné. Elle est loin d’être parfaite mais elle a le mérite d’être simple. Première étape : estimer la réduction nécessaire des pressions environnementales à l’échelle nationale pour revenir sous le seuil des limites planétaires. Pour se faire, il faut calculer l’empreinte écologique du territoire (matériaux, gaz à effet de serre, eau, sols, biodiversité, polluants, etc.) et la rapporter à des science-based targets, des niveaux maximum pour chaque type de pression qu’il ne faudrait idéalement pas dépasser. 

Deuxième étape : calculer l’évolution historique de l’intensité biophysique de l’économie, c’est-à-dire l’évolution du degré de couplage entre des indicateurs économiques (monétaires ou non) et des indicateurs écologiques. Cela permet de déduire la part de la réduction qui peut se faire grâce aux améliorations (efficiency) et la part qui ne pourra être réalisée qu’à travers une baisse des volumes (sufficiency).

Cela nous donne une idée de l’ampleur de la décroissance d’un pays à l’autre, que l’on peut exprimer en points de PIB ou avec d’autres mesures plus concrètes (e.g., nombre de vélos produits, kilomètres d’autoroutes construites, kilogrammes de viande de bœuf consommés par an). Cette approche est loin d’être parfaite mais je ne pense pas qu’elle soit plus « économiciste » que le calcul de Latouche avec l’empreinte écologique ; elle est juste plus précise et plus fiable. 

La question du comment

C’est une question qui revient constamment : la décroissance, d’accord, mais comment ? Malheureusement, peu parviennent à répondre à cette question. Comme je l’écrivais déjà dans ma thèse, « le texte typique sur la décroissance parle principalement du problème et se termine avec quelques propositions, la plupart du temps sous la forme d’un inventaire façon liste de Noël, avec peu de structure, voire pas du tout » (Parrique, 2019 : p. 470). Je suis arrivé à cette conclusion après avoir analysé 27 listes de propositions (p. 494), dont les 10 propositions du « programme électoral de la décroissance » de Serge Latouche.^[6]

Selon Latouche, pour décroître, il faudrait faire 10 choses : retrouver une empreinte écologique égale ou inférieure à une planète, intégrer les nuisances dans les coûts de transport, relocaliser les activités, restaurer l’agriculture paysanne, transformer les gains de productivité en réduction de temps de travail, impulser la production de biens relationnels, diviser par quatre le gaspillage d’énergie, pénaliser fortement les dépenses de publicité, et décréter un moratoire sur l’innovation technoscientifique. Malheureusement, difficile d’en extraire un scénario précis. C’est un bon exemple pour illustrer la critique que j’ai fait de ces inventaires de propositions : « ces listes brutes mélangent des objectifs et des instruments, ce qui les rend inopérationnelles. Pour rester dans l’analogie de la cuisine, les recettes actuelles de la décroissance sont aussi utiles que celle-ci : légumes, bon goût, sel, chaud, pâtes, juteux » (Parrique, 2019 : p. 470). 

Le seul cadre conceptuel de transition que l’on trouve chez Latouche, c’est les « 8R » : réévaluer, reconceptualiser, restructurer, redistribuer, relocaliser, réduire, réutiliser, et recycler. Selon l’auteur, il faudrait (1) changer les valeurs (de la compétition à la coopération, de la prédation au soin, etc.), ce qui implique (2) de questionner les concepts (e.g., sobriété, abondance, rareté) et donc (3) de changer la façon dont on produit et consomme, (4) de distribuer les richesses, et (5) de relocaliser. Ces changements permettraient (6) de réduire la consommation, le temps de travail, et l’empreinte écologique, (7) de favoriser la réutilisation des objets, et (8) de recycler davantage. Cette séquence en huit points représente un « cercle vertueux de décroissance, sereine, conviviale, et soutenable » (2010 : p. 521).

Je ne suis pas très fan de ce cadre conceptuel, comme je l’expliquais déjà dans ma thèse.^[7] Sa plus grande faiblesse, c’est son manque de précision : « le cadre des 8R présente un certain nombre de problèmes analytiques qui affaiblissent sa force théorique. Son plus grand problème est qu’elle est vague. Latouche évite les typologies exhaustives en recourant toujours à des ‘etc.’, évite les affirmations catégoriques en utilisant des exemples, et ne définit jamais vraiment les termes qu’il utilise » (p. 239). 

J’en étais le premier surpris mais La Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat et ses 149 recommandations a réussi à faire en six mois ce que le mouvement pour la décroissance n’a pas réussi à faire en vingt ans : élaborer un plan de transition précis et convaincant. Plus généralement, on a beau critiquer les économistes mainstream et leur obsession pour la croissance, mais forcé de constater que leurs agendas sont bien mieux rangés que les nôtres. On pourrait mentionner les 102 propositions du Rapport Draghi, soigneusement organisées en dix problématiques, ou même les Objectifs de Développement Durable (17 objectifs, 169 cibles, et 232 indicateurs). À côté de ça, même les programmes de décroissance les plus élaborés ressemblent à des listes de course écrites à la va-vite – à quand de véritables Objectifs de Décroissance Durable^[8] ?

La tâche est loin d’être impossible. Dans mes travaux actuels à l’Université de Lausanne, je suis en train de développer une méthode pour élaborer des plans de transitions plus complexes. Inspiré par la littérature des politistes sur le policy design, j’élabore de grands inventaires d’actions à plusieurs niveaux (ménages, communs, entreprises, municipal, régional, national, international). Une fois que l’on a défini ce que l’on voudrait réduire ainsi que l’ampleur de cette décroissance (d’où l’importance des deux premières étapes – le quoi et le combien), on peut sélectionner les instruments les plus efficaces pour y parvenir. Cela demande une analyse à la fois quantitative (sur l’impact de l’interdiction de la publicité sur les comportements de consommation, par exemple) et qualitative (sur la compatibilité d’une interdiction publicitaire avec la loi actuelle, le soutient politique, l’acceptabilité sociale, etc.). En étudiant minutieusement chaque instrument ainsi que leurs interactions potentielles, on arrive à élaborer une feuille de route qui répond à la question du comment d’une manière plus rigoureuse qu’une liste aléatoire. 

Peut-on faire l’économie de l’économie ? 

L’originalité de Serge Latouche, c’est d’avoir théorisé la décroissance comme une « sortie de l’économie », dans la prolongation de ses réflexions dans L’invention de l’économie (2005) et La déraison de la raison économique (2001). L’intuition est puissante. C’est d’ailleurs grâce à lui que j’ai décidé à l’époque de poursuivre le même chemin théorique dans ma thèse. Même aujourd’hui, je me considère toujours comme un disciple de l’approche Latouchienne et je vais essayer de montrer ici que, contrairement à ce que pense l’auteur^[9], nos approches ne sont pas si différentes que ça. 

Sortir de l’économie d’accord, mais pour aller où ? 

Serge Latouche ne définit pas le terme mais il nous dit que la décroissance, c’est « sortir de l’économie », « Pour concevoir la société de décroissance sereine et y accéder, il faut littéralement sortir de l’économie. Cela signifie remettre en cause sa domination sur le reste de la vie, en théorie et en pratique, mais surtout dans nos têtes » (Latouche, 2003). Le problème, c’est que Serge Latouche veut sortir de beaucoup de choses : de la croissance, de la modernité, du développement, du capitalisme, du productiviste, de l’utilitarisme, de la société de consommation, de l’euro, du culte du travail, de l’obsession du mesurable, etc. Dans l’autoroute théorique Latouchienne, il y a de nombreuses sorties mais on ne sait pas exactement dans quel ordre les prendre et encore moins où elles vont. 

Dans ma thèse, j’ai tenté de clarifier tout ça. Cela m’a mené à développer une théorie normative de déséconomisation (pp. 244-251) articulée en deux mouvements : une sortie de l’économie dans notre vision du monde et dans nos pratiques. Le premier mouvement est cognitif, c’est un rejet de la mentalité économiciste. L’économisme est cette vision du monde qui applique les cadres de l’analyse économique contemporaine à tous les problèmes et qui place les intérêts de l’économie monétaire avant tout. C’est une sorte d’obsession maximisatrice, la primauté du monétaire sur tout le reste. 

Rien de nouveau sous le soleil. Je repète ici la même chose que Latouche quand il parle de « décolonisation de l’imaginaire ». Pour essayer de rendre l’argument plus précis, j’identifie trois archétypes d’économisme moderne : les politiques de croissance des pouvoirs publics, la quête du profit des entreprises, et la poursuite des revenus des ménages. Le gouvernement portugais qui propose de sacrifier un jour férié pour relancer la croissance, les actionnaires de Total qui refusent de ralentir l’extraction de pétrole pour protéger leurs dividendes, ou une étudiante passionnée de poésie qui se résigne à faire une école de commerce pour devenir riche ; voilà trois exemples de ce mode de pensée qui donne la priorité à la croissance de l’argent. 

Déséconomiser notre imaginaire consiste à instaurer une relation plus nuancée avec ces objectifs quantitatifs et financiers qui devraient être considérés comme secondaires par rapport à d’autres objectifs qualitatifs et non-financiers (c’est pour cela que l’on peut parler de théorie normative). Mais j’ai du mal à imaginer une économisation qui puisse être totale ou, au contraire, inexistante. C’est plutôt un spectre comparatif. On peut dire que les coopératives de l’économie sociale et solidaire ou un musée sont des institutions moins économicistes qu’un ministère des Finances ou qu’une multinationale du CAC40. 

Je ne pense pas que le mode de pensée économique soit fondamentalement mauvais, mais plutôt qu’il peut devenir problématique lorsqu’il se met à coloniser d’autres modes de pensée (familial, politique, culturelle, spirituelle, scientifique, etc.). Une AMAP qui détermine un prix pour ses légumes est un processus qui demande une mentalité spécifique, par exemple de quantification des coûts ; et lorsque l’on fait ses courses au marché du coin, on compare la qualité des produits mais aussi les prix, rien d’anormal à ça. Mais cette mentalité ne devrait pas s’appliquer à d’autres sphères, par exemple celle de la famille ou de la démocratie qui sont régies par d’autres mœurs (l’amour, la beauté, la justice, etc.).^[10]

Le deuxième mouvement de déséconomisation est plus concret. Dans le premier chapitre de la thèse, j’ai théorisé la croissance économique comme un double phénomène d’extension du domaine marchand et d’intensification de l’activité. L’économisation revient à (1) étendre le domaine de l’économique, par exemple en privatisant un commun qui deviendrait alors une marchandise, et/ou à (2) accélérer le rythme de production/consommation de ces marchandises, qui viendrait mobiliser davantage de ressources humaines et naturelles. Déséconomiser consiste donc à faire précisément le contraire : (1) démarchandiser certains biens et services et (2) réduire le volume total de production/consommation. On rejoint ici les appels en faveur de la gratuité et du commoning (pour le volet démarchandisation) ainsi que du démantèlement et de la simplicité volontaire (pour le volet minimalisme). 

Ici aussi, je ne pense pas que la marchandisation soit un phénomène diabolique. L’allocation de certaines choses est mieux organisée par l’échange marchand et d’autres par la répartition politique, le don, ou la réciprocité. Il convient de rationner les organes en fonction des besoins et indépendamment du pouvoir d’achat, mais ce protocole d’allocation serait mal adapté pour les sous-vêtements ou les kilos de carottes. Encore une fois, ce qui compte, c’est la proportion des activités les plus économicisées vis-à-vis des activités les moins économicisées. C’est un fait que la santé est plus marchandisée aux États-Unis qu’en France, et l’économie locale d’un écovillage dans la Drome est surement moins marchandisée que l’économie française en générale. La croissance et la décroissance sont des phénomènes opposés : la croissance marchandise et la décroissance démarchandise. La force de la décroissance théorisée comme sortie de l’économie, c’est de se poser la question de la juste place de l’économie dans la société et de remédier à des situations de débordement économique. 

Les deux mouvements de déséconomisation (des idées et des pratiques/institutions) sont interdépendants. Plus nous passons du temps à acheter et vendre des choses, plus le penser-économique devient sens commun ; et plus cette rationalité est prévalente, plus nous avons tendance à marchandiser des choses pour que l’on puisse les acheter et les vendre. La décroissance comme sortie de l’économie consiste à briser ce cercle vicieux en l’attaquant des deux côtés : changer notre vision du monde ainsi que nos comportements. 

On comprend bien que sortir de l’économie ne signifie pas arrêter d’extraire, produire, allouer, et consommer, mais simplement de remettre l’économie à sa place, sortir de la religion de l’économie, comme le dit souvent Serge Latouche. En référence à Karl Polanyi, on pourrait dire que c’est un « ré-encastrement » de l’économique dans le social (dans la sphère des idées) et de l’économie dans la société (dans la sphère des pratiques). Serge Latouche (2007 : Partie III) dit exactement la même chose : « sortir du développement, de l’économie et de la croissance n’implique donc pas de renoncer à toutes les institutions sociales que l’économie a annexées, mais à les réenchâsser dans une autre logique ».

Mais que reste-t-il d’économique quand on est sorti de l’économie ? C’est autre limite des écrits de Serge Latouche : il ne détaille jamais vraiment l’organisation de cette au-delà, qui ne sera donc, selon lui, plus une économie mais une société. C’est pourtant le cœur du problème : comment imaginer une autre façon de vivre-ensemble au-delà de toutes ces choses auxquelles nous voulons échapper (néolibéralisme, capitalisme, extractivisme, productivisme, commercialisme, consumérisme, matérialisme, utilitarisme, etc.) ? Quel sera le rôle des marchés, des prix, et de la propriété privée ? Comment viendra-t-on créer et détruire de la monnaie ? Qui contrôlera les entreprises ? Quels indicateurs de prospérité et de progrès utilisera-t-on ? Comment financera-t-on les services publics ? 

Dans ma thèse (pp. 272-315), j’ai essayé de décrire à quoi ressemblerait cette société en identifiant 15 principes d’organisation économique qui découleraient des trois valeurs cardinales de la décroissance (autonomie, sufficience, et sollicitude) : souveraineté des ressources, soutenabilité, circularité, production socialement utile, coopération, proximité, technologie conviviale, post-travail, pluralisme des valeurs, communs, gratuité, partage, simplicité volontaire, biens relationnels, et joie de vivre. C’était un premier essai mais, en relisant cette partie aujourd’hui, je me rends compte qu’il reste beaucoup à faire. Ces principes sont trop abstraits et les exemples ne suffisent pas pour rendre le modèle concret. Nous avons besoin de continuer de préciser les contours de cette société post-économique (Latouche) / économie alternative (Parrique). C’est d’ailleurs pour cela que j’ai décidé de dédier un livre entier au sujet, qui sera la suite directe de Ralentir ou périr. 

Doit-on aussi sortir des sciences économiques ? 

Serge Latouche n’aime pas les économistes. Dans l’écosystème universitaire, les économistes sont en effet de drôles d’oiseaux. Moi aussi, j’aime bien m’en moquer (en m’incluant dans le lot). Je dis souvent que les économistes sont des sociologues en situation de handicap cognitif, des spécialistes de sociétés qui n’existent pas qui construisent des modèles qui ressemblent plus aux Sims qu’à la réalité. 

Là encore, nous avons à faire à un débordement, celui de la science économique parti coloniser les autres sciences. Remettons-là à sa juste place : la recherche en économie ne devrait être qu’une sous-catégorie des sciences sociales, sorte de sociologie de niche pour essayer de comprendre des comportements particuliers liés aux ressources, à l’argent, aux marchandises, à la production, à certains aspects du travail etc. Idéalement, ces études se feraient dans un pluralisme disciplinaire, théorique, et méthodologique. Aujourd’hui, malheureusement, la grande majorité des analyses économiques se font sous la tutelle d’un seul cadre théorique (l’économie néoclassique), d’une seule famille de méthodes (la modélisation mathématique), et sans conversation aucune avec les autres sciences sociales. 

Mais attention à ne pas mettre tous les économistes dans le même panier pour autant. Il faut différencier les variétés interdisciplinaires (sociologie de l’économie, anthropologie économique, histoire de la pensée économique, etc.), les écoles de pensée (économie Marxienne, féministe, néoclassique, post-keynésienne, écologique, etc.), les approches méthodologiques (cliométrie, économétrie, ethnographie), et aussi les positionnements idéologiques sur certains sujets comme le rôle du gouvernement (keynésiens versus libéraux, néolibéraux, et libertaires), l’organisation économique (capitalismes versus socialismes et communismes), ou la croissance (croissance verte versus décroissance).

Selon Serge Latouche, les « économistes professionnels » seraient les premiers interpellés par la décroissance. « Il existe même dans les universités anglo-saxonnes des degrowth studies. Des économistes qui construisent des savants modèles économétriques de transition » (2024 : p. 121) ; « des économistes obsessionnels voulant se recycler dans la décroissance [qui proposent] de beaux modèles économétriques » (2023, p. 31). Rassurons-le : c’est loin d’être le cas. Très peu des chercheurs en décroissance sont des économistes, et seulement une infime partie de cette infime partie fait de la modélisation. C’est dommage d’ailleurs, j’aimerais bien que plus d’économistes s’intéressent au sujet. 

« Quand les économistes s’emparent du thème de la décroissance, ils en ont inévitablement une lecture économiciste », affirme Serge Latouche (2025 : p. 16). Pas forcément, et j’en suis le parfait exemple, comme je l’ai démontré dans la partie précédente. J’ai défendu une thèse de doctorat en économie sur la décroissance théorisée comme une sortie de l’économie – on peut difficilement me reprocher une interprétation économiciste. Après tout, n’oublions pas que Serge Latouche lui aussi est économiste. On peut bien sûr trouver quelques lectures économicistes du sujet^[11], mais celles-ci sont rares et viennent toujours de personnes en dehors des degrowth studies. 

Dernier exemple en date, une tribune signée par dix économistes en réponse à un article de Jean-Pisani Ferry dans Le Monde. La vision de ce dernier est en effet étroite, représentant parfaitement la posture des mainstream vis-à-vis de la décroissance. Mais la réponse du collectif d’économistes associé à la Société francophone d’économie écologique ne fait pas la même erreur. « Dire que la décroissance ne propose pas de“meilleure mesure de la performance économique” que le produit intérieur brut (PIB) et ses dérivés, c’est passer à côté du propos de ce mouvement, qui ne réduit pas la question de la mesure à un choix purement technique et entend remettre au centre du débat les finalités de l’activité économique – assurer un bien vivre collectif, qui ne se fasse pas aux dépens de l’environnement, des plus pauvres ou des générations futures ».

Une autre erreur que je ne peux pas laisser passer. Serge Latouche s’égare quand il affirme que l’économie écologique « ne peut aboutir qu’à la croissance verte » (Latouche, 2025 : p. 16). Reprocher à l’économie écologique de défendre la croissance verte est aussi absurde que de reprocher à l’héliocentrisme d’affirmer que le soleil tourne autour de la Terre. L’impossibilité de la croissance verte est la pierre angulaire de l’économie écologique comme cadre théorique.^[12] Quand Latouche la qualifie de « monstruosité conceptuelle », j’ai l’impression qu’il fait une erreur de débutant : confondre l’économie réelle (une économie écologiquement soutenable) et la science économique (une recherche en économie qui intégrerait des théories venant de l’écologie comme discipline).  

La langue anglaise possède deux mots différents (economy et economics), ce qui évite les malentendus. Quand on se présente comme économiste écologique (ecological economist), ce n’est pas tant un jugement de valeur sur la nécessité de rendre l’économie moins destructrice de la nature, mais plutôt une filiation ontologique, méthodologique, et épistémologique.^[13] Par exemple, l’un des présupposés ontologiques de l’économie écologique depuis les travaux de Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen est que l’économie est encastrée dans le monde du vivant, et ne peut donc échapper aux lois de la biologie et de la physique. Faire de l’économie écologique, c’est faire de la recherche en économie avec des contraintes spécifiques liées à l’entropie de l’énergie, la finitude des ressources non-renouvelables, l’irréversibilité des effondrement écosystémiques, etc. – Serge Latouche s’insère pleinement dans cette école de pensée, ce qui fait du lui un économiste écologique. 

La décroissance française est-elle la plus radicale de toutes ?

C’est un petit jeu bien connu parmi les écologistes : plus radical que moi, tu meurs. Il y aurait les vrais de vrais, ceux qui n’utilisent même pas les emails^[14], et les autres, avec leur sales iPhone, leurs comptes sociaux d’influenceurs capitalistes, et leurs vélos électriques plein de cobalt. Selon Serge Latouche (2024 : p. 89), « de jeunes ambitieux ont lancé des degrowth studies qui n’ont pas la radicalité de la décroissance », une thèse appuyée par les éditeurs du mensuel La décroissance dans l’encart de couverture qui titre « Serge Latouche contre la dénaturation de la décroissance ». Mais est-ce vraiment le cas ? 

La radicalité du contenu 

Certains semblent dire que la décroissance « à la française » serait la plus radicale de toute, et que les degrowth studies ne serait qu’une version diluée de cette dernière. Pour savoir si c’est le cas, regardons de près l’article de Serge Latouche dans Le monde diplomatique de 2003, l’un des premiers sur le sujet. Si Serge Latouche a raison, ce texte devrait aller beaucoup plus loin que les degrowth studies actuelles. Et pourtant, il n’en est rien. C’est l’archétype du degrowth as usual : empreinte écologique, effet rebond, critique de l’éco-efficience, sortie de l’économie, décolonisation de l’imaginaire, simplicité volontaire, réduction du temps de travail, le tout soupoudré de quelques références à Ivan Illich, Herman Daly, et Jacques Ellul. Il n’y a rien dans ce texte qui n’ait pas été incorporé dans ce qu’on lirait d’un Giorgos Kallis, d’un Jason Hickel, ou dans mes travaux.

Je pense d’ailleurs que ces penseurs sont allés beaucoup plus loin sur de nombreux points comme l’autolimitation (Éloge des limites, 2022), les inégalités environnementales (Moins pour plus, 2022), la relation avec l’éco-socialisme (Kallis, 2019), ou la critique de la croissance verte (e.g., Hickel and Kallis, 2019). Ce que Serge Latouche peine à comprendre, c’est qu’un grand nombre de chercheurs de la deuxième génération se sont nourris, non seulement des textes originaux des précurseurs mais aussi de la littérature francophone des années 2000 (P. Ariès, Agnès Sinaï, F. Schneider, P. Rabhi, F. Flipo, M. Lepesant, ainsi que tous les auteurs et autrices de la revue Entropia). Sauf que nous ne nous sommes pas arrêtés là. Les degrowth studies se sont élargie à de nouveaux cercles (les tourism studies, les organisation studies, les fashion studies, etc.), ce qui a considérablement enrichi la littérature. 

Serge Latouche me reproche d’être réformiste (et non révolutionnaire), et cela car je ne propose que des instruments de politique publique. Là encore, c’est mal connaître mes travaux. Dès The political economy of degrowth (2019 : pp. 484-492), j’avais élargi la définition classique d’une « policy » : « Une politique de décroissance est une ligne de conduite ou un principe d’action adopté ou proposé par une organisation ou un individu visant à atteindre les objectifs de la décroissance [les 31 objectifs que j’avais défini dans la troisième partie de la thèse] » (p. 485). Mes degrowth policies regroupent donc toutes les actions intentionnelles entreprises pour remédier à un problème précis, et pas seulement les décisions des pouvoirs publics : « au sens large, toute modification délibérée des règles et des coutumes qui régissent le comportement est une politique et toute personne qui invente, développe et peaufine cette intervention est un décideur politique » (pp. 484-485). 

J’avais donné une foule d’exemples hypothétiques comme une loi contre l’écocide votée au Parlement, l’introduction d’un taux d’intérêt négatif par le comité de gestion d’une monnaie locale, une entreprise qui décide de réduire les bonus qu’elle verse à ses employés, une université qui refuse de payer l’abonnement à Elsevier, un syndicat qui rentre en grève, un ménage qui arrête de manger de la viande pour réduire son empreinte écologique. On retrouve d’ailleurs une grande diversité de propositions dans Fitzpatrick et al. (2022), un inventaire de 530 politiques de décroissance qui occupent tout le spectre des radicalités, de la plus réformiste à la plus révolutionnaire. 

La radicalité de la méthode 

Entre l’été 2004 et 2005, l’ingénieur François Schneider est parti avec une ânesse pour colporter l’idée de la décroissance à travers la France, une prouesse low-tech souvent érigée en mythe dans les milieux décroissants. J’aime bien cette histoire et j’ai un immense respect pour François Schneider, que je considère comme un pilier de l’école française de la décroissance. Mais chacun ses techniques. Oui, j’ai un compte Instagram, et oui, je prends le TGV pour aller donner des conférences à l’étranger. C’est la façon la plus adaptée que j’ai trouvé de partager mes connaissances, mais mes théories ne devraient pas souffrir du fait qu’elles soit exposées sur les réseaux sociaux ou non.^[15]

Dans l’article du journal La décroissance, nous sommes avec Jean-Marc Jancovici décrits comme « les deux chouchous des médias, d’une décroissance digérée par le chiffre ».^[16] Si la radicalité consiste à s’enfermer dans un catéchisme antiscience où les slogans brumeux remplacent les définitions et les chiffres (le crédo du journal), alors je n’en veux pas. J’ai mes désaccords avec Jean-Marc, surtout sur sa façon maladroite de parler de décroissance, mais cela n’enlève en rien l’utilité des travaux du Shift qui ont beaucoup fait avancer l’écologie en France. Le Plan de transformation de l’économie française (2022), par exemple, est extrêmement précieux pour discuter des détails d’une transition écologique. C’est quelque chose que les décroissants n’ont d’ailleurs jamais réussi à faire – en partie par manque de moyen, mais aussi à cause des autolimitations théoriques que j’ai exposé dans la première partie de cette réponse. 

Pour Serge Latouche (2025 : p. 16), on ne devrait pas « sortir [la décroissance] de sa culture d’origine, en l’occurrence latine, pour l’universaliser et l’internationaliser, c’est-à-dire en fait l’anglo-saxonniser » Je ne suis pas du tout d’accord. La science ne devrait pas se cantonner aux frontières politiques, culturelles, et linguistiques. C’est une richesse de pouvoir discuter de degrowth avec d’autres chercheurs et activistes venant des quatre coins de la planète (e.g., la décroissance décoloniale mexicaine, le communisme décroissant japonais, le Postwachstum allemand, ou la simpler way australienne). 

Si le terme n’avait pas été traduit, et sans le travail acharné du collectif Research & Degrowth, la décroissance serait restée une mouvance ésotérique, sorte d’apéro entre déjà-convaincus qui se regroupent une fois par mois pour lire du Gorz. Le GIEC n’aurait jamais parlé de décroissance. et des médias comme BBC, Arte, Financial Times, CNBC, ou Al Jazeera non plus. C’est encore plus vrai pour moi : sans la Degrowth Summer school de l’université de Barcelone, je n’aurais jamais découvert l’existence du concept. Barcelone a maintenant deux Masters et accueille une foule grandissante de doctorant·es qui théorisent une décroissance tout aussi radicale (mais beaucoup plus rigoureuse) que celle que l’on discutait en France au début des années 2000. 

Les décroissants critiquent souvent la théorie du donut de Kate Raworth, sans vraiment se demander pourquoi les donuts se vendent beaucoup mieux que des·croissants. Certains dirons que c’est parce que c’est un cadre proto-capitaliste, économiciste, un cheval de Troyes néoclassique, etc. Mais je pense que la vérité est ailleurs. Si le donut est devenu le concept le plus populaire pour parler des liens entre l’économie et l’écologie, c’est tout simplement parce que c’est un cadre efficace. Il est clair, solide, et utile. Il permet à de nombreuses personnes à l’échelle des pays et des villes de mesurer l’ampleur d’un retour dans les limites planétaires (ce qui est impossible avec le cadre théorique actuel de la décroissance). C’est aussi grâce au talent de communication et de diplomatie de Kate Raworth, qui a transformé un maigre working paper en 2012 en livre sept ans plus tard, puis en centre de recherche deux ans après (le Doughnut Economics Action Lab). 

L’erreur faite par une partie du mouvement de la décroissance en France, c’est de s’être replié sur lui-même. Au lieu d’engager des conversations constructives avec ses détracteurs et ses alliés, la décroissance française s’est mis tout le monde dos. La tribune diffamatoire des « écotartuffes » du journal La Décroissance a tapé maladroitement un peu près sur toutes celles et ceux qui s’intéressent à l’écologie. À les entendre, les seuls vrais radicaux, ce seraient eux, une poignée de vieux monsieurs qui s’enorgueillissent de pouvoir citer du Charbonneau mais qui sont absolument incapables d’expliquer clairement et calmement ce qu’est la décroissance et comment l’organiser.  

J’ai choisi un autre chemin, celui du dialogue. Je passe beaucoup de temps à discuter avec les chercheurs du Doughnut Economics Action Lab, les activistes d’Extinction Rébellion, les spécialistes de l’Économie Sociale et Solidaire, et même avec les macroéconomistes néoclassiques de la Commission Européenne. J’accepte des invitations incongrues pour aller expliquer la décroissance à des magistrats, des médecins, ou des étudiants d’écoles de commerce, tout en restant disponible auprès d’un public plus proche de la cause pour continuer à développer l’idée. Je passe beaucoup de temps à répondre aux critiques, en essayant d’utiliser ces opportunités pour enrichir l’idée. Pour l’instant, cette posture a l’air de bien mieux marcher que le plus-décroissant-que-moi-tu-meurs de certains idéologues un peu gauches. 

***

Serge Latouche m’accuse de « ringardiser » mes prédécesseurs. Sa tribune est la preuve parfaite que certains décroissants un peu trop têtus n’ont pas besoin de mon aide pour montrer que leur posture est dépassée. À grands coups d’approximations et de déclarations sans preuves, le pape de la décroissance se lance dans une vendetta contre les degrowth studies. Comme Don Quichotte qui prenait les moulins pour des monstres, Serge Latouche s’attaque à ce qu’il voit comme des « monstruosités conceptuelles ». Ce sont en fait seulement des concepts, en grande partie beaucoup plus fins et sophistiqués que la décroissance des années 2000 qu’il a connu. Oui, il est maintenant possible de définir la décroissance, de la mesurer, et de répondre à la question du comment. On ne peut pas trop lui en vouloir vu que cette littérature s’est développé essentiellement en anglais, une langue que Serge lit difficilement. On peut par contre lui reprocher de tirer à l’aveugle sur un corpus qu’il connait mal. La décroissance évolue et c’est une bonne chose – ne faisons pas la guerre à tous les progrès. 

^[1] Serge Latouche était là depuis le début. C’est l’un des cinq contributeurs du numéro de Silence de février 2002 sur la décroissance où il signait « A bas le développement durable ! Vive la décroissance conviviale » (pp. 8-11). C’est aussi l’auteur de l’un des premiers articles dans un grand média (« Pour une société de décroissance » dans Le monde diplomatique de novembre 2003). Son livre principal sur le sujet est Le pari de la décroissance (2006), une idée qu’il continuera d’explorer et d’expliquer dans plusieurs ouvrages (e.g., Vers une société d’abondance frugale, 2011 ; La décroissance, 2019). Il me semble que le seul de ses livres ayant été traduit en anglais soit Petit traité de décroissance sereine, 2007, publié sous le titre Farewell to growth en 2009.

^[2] « De la provocation de la décroissance aux degrowth studies », l’épilogue de la 3^ème mise à jour du Que-sais-je ? sur la décroissance ; « Le développement économique s’inscrit dans une démarche ethnocidaire », un entretien dans le hors-série de Socialter « Décroissance : réinventer l’abondance », automne 2024, p. 84 ; « Vingt ans de décroissance : quel bilan ? » dans François Jarrige et Hélène Tordjman, Décroissances, Le passager clandestin, 2023, pp. 21-41 ; et, le plus récent, « Transmission, triomphe, ou trahison : de la décroissance aux degrowth studies » dans le n°219 du mensuel papier La Décroissance, juillet-août 2025, pp. 16-17. 

^[3] L’élément cité vient de ma définition de la post-croissance : « une économie stationnaire en harmonie avec la nature où les décisions sont prises ensemble et où les richesses sont équitablement partagées afin de pouvoir prospérer sans croissance » (Parrique, 2022 : p. 15). Ces deux définitions sont données dès l’introduction du livre et structurent deux chapitres différents. « Chapitre 6 : Un chemin de transition. Mettre l’économie en décroissance » et « Chapitre 7 : Un projet de société. Vers une économie de la post-croissance ». Une erreur qui aurait pu être facilement évitée. 

^[4] C’est une critique plus générale qu’on peut lui faire : l’auteur donne souvent des chiffres un peu au hasard. Selon lui, on ne devrait pas dépasser 3 milliards d’humains maximum sur la planète (Latouche, 2006 : Chapitre 5), 30 000 personnes dans chaque ville (Latouche, 2006 : Chapitre 9), et entre 300 et 500 employés par entreprise (Latouche, 2006 : p. 266). Ces chiffres ne sont jamais vraiment justifiés ou liés à des publications scientifiques, ce qui affaiblit la solidité de l’argument.

^[5] Le 28 juin 2025, l’économiste Jean Pisani-Ferry déclarait dans Le Monde que « si le terme de décroissance traduit un rejet louable du consumérisme effréné, il n’a macroéconomiquement pas de sens clair. En particulier, il ne propose pas une meilleure mesure de la performance économique et ne dit pas à quoi il faudrait allouer les gains de productivité dans un régime de décroissance ». Même si les réponses aux questions de Jean Pisani-Ferry existent déjà dans la littérature académique sur le sujet, elles sont trop souvent noyées dans des discours brumeux sur la décolonisation de l’imaginaire, l’anti-utilitarisme convivialiste, et la sortie de l’économie économiciste.  

^[6] On peut retrouver cette liste dans Farewell to growth, 2009 : pp. 68-76 en anglais et dans Petit traité de décroissance sereine, 2007 : partie III / Le Pari de la décroissance, 2006 : Chapitre 11 en français. 

^[7] « But the 8R has a number of analytical issues that weakens its theoretical strength. It biggest problem is that it is vague. Latouche shies away from finite typologies by always resorting to “etc.,” avoids definite statement by using examples, and never quite defines the terms he uses, starting with the values that underpin the entire process (first “R”). At the end of the work, one is left wondering, as an example of one question among many, what exactly is “care” or what is the desirable horizon of a process of “redistribution.” This makes it both a disappointing utopia and a poor transition strategy. (…) Some steps are overly general (reduce and re-evaluate) and others overly specific (reuse and recycle). Is not relocalisation a form of reduction, of the distance between producers and consumers for instance? Is not reducing income inequality the same as redistributing income? As a transition framework, it is a rhetorical heuristic, at best, but does not tell us much about concrete policies and strategies. The changes have no actors or specific institutions and no geographical or political perimeter. Pedagogical as they are, Latouche’s “8R” leave us none the wiser as to how we might achieve degrowth in reality. (…) Then why eight steps and not more or less? The framework has apparent exhaustiveness issues. In his latest book, Latouche (2019a: 51) proposes to extend the list with resilience, resistance, radicalise, redeploy, redefine, re-size, remodel, rethink, re-enchant, again followed by an “etc.,” just like he did when he first presented the framework in 2003. This is not a conceptual framework, it is a conceptual buffet – which is paradoxical for a theory that is itself based on the setting of limits. In the end, the 8R is more of a slogan than a theory »(Parrique, 2019: p. 239).

^[8] Dans ma thèse (Chapitre 9, 10, 11), j’avais proposé le cadre suivant : 3 sphères institutionnelles de transformation (la propriété, le travail, et la monnaie), 9 objectifs (sharing possessions, democratic ownership of business, stewardship of nature, work time reduction, decent work, postwork, monetary diversity,sovereign banking, et slow finance) décomposés en 31 sous-objectifs, et 9 stratégies pour les atteindre. Pour un résumé, voir The political economy of degrowth (pp. 700-706). 

^[9] Selon Serge Latouche, les degrowth studies « s’inscrivent plus dans la mouvance de l’économie alternative que dans celle d’une alternative à l’économie » (2023, p. 31).

^[10] Serge Latouche associe l’économie à la sphère du rationnel, mais peut-on vraiment dire que le choix d’avoir de former un couple, de choisir d’apprendre la flute, ou bien de voter pour un parti spécifique sont des choix irrationnels ? Bien sûr que non. Ces choix relèvent seulement de différentes sphères de rationalité : celle de l’amour gouverné par les émotions, celle de l’art gouverné par la beauté, et celle de la politique gouverné par des notions de justice. 

^[11] Hormis les critiques de la décroissance venant d’économistes (e.g., Paul Krugman, Jacques Attali, David Cayla, Serge Allegrezza, Christian Gollier, Alessio Terzi, Olivier Passet), on peut trouver quelques rare études où des économistes néoclassiques se saisissent du concept tout en le vidant de sa substance – voir, par exemple, Aghion et al. (2025) et Artus (2022). Mais il existe aussi des économistes hétérodoxes brillants qui travaillent sérieusement sur le sujet (e.g., Louison Cahen-Fourrot, Elke Pirgmaier, Blair Fix, Antoine Monserand, Giorgos Kallis, Elena Hofferberth, Simone d’Alessandro, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns). 

^[12] L’économie écologique est une école de pensée hétérodoxe en sciences économiques qui existe depuis les années 1980, inspiré des travaux de pionniers comme Karl William Capp, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding, ou Herman Daly. Pour aller plus loin, voir le Routeldge Handbook in Ecological Economics (2017) et le Handbook of Ecological Economics (2015). Il est important de noter qu’historiquement, l’économie écologique est née d’une critique de l’économie de l’environnement, cette dernière étant l’application du cadre théorique néoclassique aux problématiques environnementales – pour comprendre la différence entre les deux, voir Venkatachakam (2007) ou Venkatachalam (2025). L’un des points de contention était précisément la question de la croissance verte. 

^[13] Voir, par exemple, Foundations of social ecological economics (2024) by Clive Spash.

^[14] Avec un collègue, nous avons créé il y a quelques année le Degrowth Journal, la première revue académique anglophone sur le sujet. Son contenu étant gratuit, j’avais pensé qu’il serait bon de l’annoncer dans le mensuel La Décroissance. En cherchant l’adresse mail des responsables du journal, j’étais tombé sur ce message « chers lecteurs, chères lectrices, trop de SPAMs nous accablent depuis cette page contact avec le formulaire en ligne. Nous vous recommandons d’utiliser la bonne, simple et conviviale carte postale ou lettre ». J’ai donc rédigé une lettre à la main pour annoncer la nouvelle, lettre qui est malheureusement restée sans réponse. 

^[15] Même si je prenais la tête de la Société Générale, que je roulais en Porsche Cayenne et que je prenais l’habitude de manger du sushi de dauphins, cela ne devrait changer en rien la véracité de ce que j’ai démontré dans mes écrits. On peut bien sûr me critiquer sur mes choix de vie mais on ne peut pas partir de ces choix pour attaquer mes théories. Ne répliquons la tactique fourbe de certains médias de discréditer les écolos (et encore plus les décroissants) à partir de leurs choix de vie. Ce que l’on doit critiquer pour faire avancer la science, ce sont les idées, pas les personnes.

^[16] L’article est d’ailleurs illustré par un dessin où l’on voit un homme en costume vert portant les logos des « degrowth studies » et de « the shift project » faire un salut militaire. On lit sur l’affiche : « Une économie de guerre pour sauver la planète, engage-toi dans l’écocratie ». Depuis sa création en 2004, le journal La Décroissance excelle dans l’art de tirer sur ses alliés, de générer des controverses contre-productives à base d’amalgames et de caricatures, et de provoquer inutilement avec des illustrations et des titres de mauvais gout. Paradoxalement pour un journal censé popularisé la pensée de la décroissance, il a historiquement fait exactement le contraire : rendre le terme le plus détestable possible. 

Good news, the Financial Times ran a piece on degrowth. It’s a 3-min video titled “Could the degrowth movement save our planet?” starring economics columnist Soumaya Keynes. Perfect opportunity to prolong the discussion by mobilising some of the academic literature on the topic.^[1] Since this is not a direct critique of degrowth, I shall not write my usual response. Instead, I will run through the script of the video (the bolded citations in coloured squares) and make a number of nuances and additions. 

“It’s an economic movement that started around the 1970s, and it’s the idea that if we want to protect the planet, we’re going to have to consume less and produce less. We’re going to need less growth.” 

The term “décroissance” (degrowth) was born in France in the early 2000s.^[2] It builds on various critical works from the 1970s which are now referred as “objections to growth.”^[3] In Slow Down or Die. The Economics of Degrowth (2025), I define degrowth as a “downscaling of production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints planned democratically in a way that is equitable while securing wellbeing.” As I explain in more details in Defining degrowth (2025), degrowth as an idea cannot be properly captured with minimal definitions like “consume less and produce less,” which makes it indifferentiable from a regular recession.^[4]

Degrowth is not exactly the same as “less growth.” If economic growth slows down, let’s say from 2% to 1%, there is indeed less growth but GDP is still getting bigger. The term degrowth is used to describe an actual reduction of the size of an economy. If we were to measure it in terms of GDP, it would imply negative rates of growth. But let’s be careful. Equating a chaotic recession with controlled degrowth just because it provokes a decline in GDP is as absurd as comparing an amputation to a diet just because it results in weight loss (for more on the difference between degrowth and recession, see Hickel, 2021 and Parrique, 2019: pp. 322-330). 

“According to degrowthers the problem with growth is that a relentless drive of consumption and production is killing the planet. It’s leading to things like deforestation, overfishing and rising carbon emissions.”

Let’s start elsewhere. The problem is that high-income economies use too much ressources and emit too much pollution (see Fanning et al., 2022). In ecological economics, we say that their biophysical metabolism is overshooting planetary boundaries, which means that their ecological footprint exceeds the biocapacity of ecosystems. Today, no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use (O’Neill et al., 2018) – that’s the core issue. Even without any further economic growth, all high-income nations would still be ecologically in the red.  

“Killing the planet” may sound dramatic but there is solid science to back it up. Emit too much greenhouse gases and the climate will start malfunctioning; artificialise too much land and you will destroy some species’ habitat; offload too much novel entities and you will endanger certain living organisms. What we know from ecology is that every natural system has a red line. If we cross it, we take the risk of degrading ecosystems and losing the valuable services they provide. Saying that an economy is ecologically unsustainable means that it exerts too much pressure on nature, therefore creating a risk of ecosystem collapse, the environmental version of a recession. 

When discussing this problem, degrowthers argue that producing and consuming more further complicates the challenge of bringing environmental pressures down to sustainable levels, which would be easier in a non-growing economy (and much easier in a degrowing economy). Additionally, growth-critical scholars also criticise what German historian Matthias Schmelzer calls “the hegemony of growth,” the fact that countries and companies tend to put GDP and profits before ecological sustainability, which, again, makes the ecological transition more complicated than it would be in a growth agnostic society where growth is not actively pursued. 

“[Degrowthers] believe that we need to cut emissions. Rich countries should focus on pulling emissions down to zero by curbing economic activity.”

Pulling emissions down to zero is not enough. The goal of an ecological transition is not only carbon neutrality but environmental neutrality. To prosper sustainably, an economy should not degrade its supporting ecosystems, which means it should respect a number of interdependent limits having to do with material extraction, land-use, water pollution, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, etc (the nine planetary or Earth system boundaries is the most popular concept to bring different environmental dimensions into one single framework). Think of it as a Rubik’s Cube; to achieve sustainability, all colours must be solved together. 

Lowering the total footprint of an economy is much more difficult than only reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which is perhaps why ecological economists resort to more radical strategies than people who only focus on climate mitigation. What makes degrowth unique in the current intellectual landscape is that it brands itself as an intentional slowdown of economic activities. This is what sets it apart from other concepts like green growth, sustainable development, green new deals, circular economy, wellbeing economy, ecosocialism, and socialism, which either assume that the transition will not imply an economic contraction, or fail to specify whether it will or not. 

Even though degrowth mobilises elements that one finds in other discourses (e.g., plant-based diets, agroecology, not-for-profit cooperatives, slow mobility), its defining trait is to illuminate practices that should be abandoned (e.g., extraction of fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, advertising, useless megaprojects). The focal point of degrowth is mainly – although not exclusively – to phase down or phase out socially unessential and ecologically unsustainable goods and services. Degrowth scholars assume that the magnitude of this drawdown will be so significant that it will lead to a decrease in overall levels of economic activity.^[5]

“Degrowthers aren’t saying that poor countries have to remain poor. They can grow, up to a point, but rich countries should drop down to that level and then stop.”

Let’s begin with what should be obvious: one should not ask someone who is struggling to feed themselves to go on a diet. Degrowth should only apply to those who already have enough, starting with the most privileged. It makes ecological sense because “affluence is the main global driver of environmental impacts,” as one can read in the latest Global Resource Outlook (2024: p. 63). When it comes to climate change, for example, the richest 10% (680 million people) generate 48% of all emissions while the poorest half of humanity – almost 4 billion people – accounts for only 12% of the global carbon footprint (Chancel et al. 2023: p. 86). Materials are split even more unequally than carbon. In 2022, 7 gigatonnes of materials were extracted globally with higher-income nations accounting for 31% of world material consumption (Circle Economy 2023: p. 40). The 1 billion richest individuals consume 72% of global resources, while the 1.2 billion poorest accounts for just 1%. Low-income countries only have a steady access to less than 3% of global material extraction (IRP 2019: pp. 7–8).

In a finite world, the too-much of a minority of affluent people quickly becomes the not-enough of everyone else down the line. The countries aspiring to higher living standards cannot properly achieve prosperity if their resources are being squandered by others.^[6] This is why I consider degrowth to be “a strategy for global justice” (Parrique, 2025: Chapter 3). Downsizing high-footprint, low-wellbeing activities in already-rich economies would reduce global rates of extraction and pollution for the benefit of poorer countries whose ecosystems and communities feel most of the burn. This would also preserve as much of the remaining ecological budget as possible for those who have used it the least and who need it the most.

“Degrowthers have ideas about what they want people to be consuming less of. Ecologically damaging products, like SUVs, or weapons, or private jets, or industrial meat.”

It’s not as ideological as it sounds. Doctors also have ideas about what they want people to be consuming less of (tobacco, sugary drinks, alcohol, etc.). But this is not ideology, it’s science. If the consumption of these products degrades health (as science shows), then doctors should recommend consuming less of them for the sake of health. Same situation for the ecological transition. If you want to reduce the ecological footprint of a territory, you need to focus on the goods and services that are most ecologically intensive, which is why SUVs, flights, and meat are often given as examples.^[7]

But this is not enough. A socially acceptable slowdown should also consider the wellbeing footprints of different goods and services. At equal ecological intensity, a mayor would most likely prefer to shut down a mall than a hospital. When forced to ration, it makes sense to give up on the things that are considered least essential. We make similar decisions every day when we work and spend, except it is money and time and not natural ressources that we allocate. The challenge of degrowth requires us to include biophysical budgets in these daily decisions in order to achieve specific environmental targets. 

Someone might prefer turning vegetarian rather than giving up their car and it might be the opposite for someone else; companies will readjust their production following different mentalities and priorities; an Alpine village will not make the same decisions as a Basque coastal town. Degrowth is a macroeconomic consequence that reflects a myriad of smaller behavioural changes for households, companies, and governments. What’s important for us ecological macroeconomists is that the grand total of these multi-level actions should lead to a sufficient drop in resource use and environmental impacts, enough to get an economy back within planetary boundaries. 

“Now, they don’t think that this has to come at the cost of human well-being. This is where their other policy proposals come in. They think we need radical economic change, like a shorter work week or a universal basic income.”

It’s easy to imagine catastrophic ways of slowing down and past recessions are perfect examples of that. But unlike a recession which takes an economy by surprise, a degrowth transition could be implemented willingly – in Managing without growth (2019), the Canadian macroeconomist Peter Victor makes the difference between a transition “by design” and “by disaster. To continue the eating analogy, a recession would be starvation due to an unexpected lack of food whereas degrowth is closer to a proactive switch of diet. 

Here is a way for economists to think about it. The challenge is to manage to lower the ecological intensity of wellbeing or, said differently, to decouple needs satisfaction from environmental pressures. This is a goal shared among several neighbouring discourses such as the wellbeing economy, the foundational economy, the care economy, the doughnut economy, eco-socialism, or post-growth. Current economic debates tend to confuse means and ends, but the fundamental purpose of an economy is quite simple: maximising quality of life while minimising resource use, including working time and energy/materials. 

Everyone agrees that a traditional recession is not going to do that, hence the need for a more sophisticated policy design. The shorter working week, for example, could be a way of sharing available hours of work in shrinking sectors as to minimise unemployment.^[8] The idea of an ecological transition income is being discussed as a way of supporting regenerative activities that are not yet economically viable, a goal that could also be achieved via the implementation of a job guarantee. (For an inventory of degrowth policy proposals, see Fitzpatrick et al., 2022.) To these public policies, one should also add all the actions and initiatives led by civil society that, through resistance and social innovation, also lead to a managed slowdown, what Joan Martinez-Alier calls “degrowth practices.”

“Some say that the movement misses out some really important questions. Like, what are poorer countries supposed to do exactly? Reducing carbon emissions is as much of a job for them as it is for richer ones. In 2023, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil were all among the top six emitters of greenhouse gases.”

These rankings can be misleading. Let’s not forget that Europe and North America are the source of half of cumulated emissions since 1850 (Chancel 2022). Looking at CO₂ emissions in excess of the carbon budget that would limit global warming to 1.5°C as a measure of climate breakdown, the G8 nations – representing less than 15%  of world population – are responsible for 85% of the emission overshoot (Hickel 2020).^[9] Likewise, the unequal split of access to materials goes back a long way. Looking at cumulative material use in excess of equitable and sustainable boundaries, high-income nations are responsible for 74% of global excess material use while the Global South is responsible for only 8%, including low-income countries who only caused 1% of global overshoot in material use (Hickel et al. 2022). 

Everyone knows that emissions should be cut as fast as possible, and this everywhere where they occur. Where degrowthers are a bit more precise is to argue is that it is easier to cut them in affluent countries that can afford the slowdown than to put that extra pressure on regions of the world where poverty remains. Countries with large GDPs have the option to produce and consume less (additionally to producing and consuming differently, of course).^[10] Other, less privileged parts of the world cannot afford to shrink and therefore will have to do their best to produce and consume differently.  

Every country in the world should aim at being ecologically sustainable. To get there, the balance between less and different will not be the same everywhere. Countries in the global North must reduce their imports of natural ressources as much as possible while increasing their contribution to financing loss and damages abroad. Low-income countries must redirect their human and natural resources to the satisfaction of local needs while avoiding the materialist pitfalls of a model of development obsessed with growth (see the literature on post-development).  

“And in richer countries, how are we going to get less growth without some really nasty political consequences? People do not like their living conditions stagnating. They do not enjoy recessions.”

Everyone hates catastrophic recessions and everyone would hate to live in a world with dead ecosystems. The goal is to find a compromise between these two dystopian scenarios. What we know from the burgeoning scholarship on the topic is that, if planned intelligently, degrowth could remediate most of the nasty consequences you would expect from a recession (e.g., unemployment, price instability, poverty and inequality, public austerity). But let’s be lucid. The choice we really have is between a carefully planned degrowth today (a transition by design) or a dangerously unplanned collapse tomorrow (a transition by disaster). If we were to vote for the two, I don’t think many would favour the latter. 

A common problem is that we overestimate the benefits of economic growth. For instance, people think that a growing GDP will raise wages, reduce inequality, and even eradicate poverty. Most of the time it doesn’t. There is now a large literature showing that, in high-income economies, quality of life is not primarily determined by income.^[11] One piece of evidence among many others: the UK sits at the 23^rd position in the World Happiness Report ranking, far behind countries with significantly lower GDP per capita such as Costa-Rica (n°6), Mexico (n°10), or Slovenia (n°19).   

Overestimating the benefits of growth makes us overestimate the costs of degrowth. National income could well decline while the income of the poorest rises if effective redistribution mechanisms are in place. Since environmental degradation harm the poorest first and most, any action towards sustainability is likely to improve their living conditions. Worries about inflation, unemployment, and austerity, problems that are far from insurmountable, are too often used to justify ecological inaction. But let’s be sure of one thing. However difficult you think organising degrowth is, it is much easier than to make an economy function with nature going down. This is an old argument for which there is now plenty of empirical proof: the costs of transition are lower than the cost of inaction. 

“But degrowthers say, less growth doesn’t mean that we all have to live in caves. If we watched fewer ads and forced companies to make stuff that didn’t break all the time, we’d end up consuming less stuff and we’d be just as content.”

That’s a powerful point. Science shows that advertising incites consumption. According to a recent study for France, advertising expenses caused a 5.3% increase of consumption and a 6.6% increase in working time. It means that, without the yearly 34 billion euros spent in advertising by a very small number of brands^[12], we could each work 2,5 hours less per week without any loss in quality of life. Since survey data tell us that people dislike ads,^[13] this could be a double blessing: eliminating a daily annoyance while liberating time and ressources for other, more useful purposes.   

Planned obsolescence is another good example of social-ecological waste. No one likes to see their appliances break, especially not environmentalists who are painfully aware that replacing them is resource intensive. If we could keep our washing machine twice longer, everyone would benefit. One could also imagine sharing what we already have more effectively. While I suspect it is common for households to each have their own washing machine in the UK, most of them are shared at the level of the building in Sweden. Do Brits have cleaner clothes than Swedes? I doubt it. Is the ecological footprint of washing lower in Sweden than it is in the UK? Yes, it is. Again, this is a win-win situation: access to better appliances via financial pooling (especially for poorest households) and lower footprint. 

Some will say that this will generate unemployment but it’s red herring. There is no point wasting valuable natural resources to produce something that is not needed. Simplifying needs through minimalism and commoning enables us to decrease working hours. It’s not something to be feared, it’s a sign of economic progress – it means we can achieve the same quality of life while spending less time at work. The only hurdle, which is specific to today’s capitalist economy, is that most people cannot afford to work less. But that’s a problem of distribution, not of production, something that can easily be solved with policies like basic income, care income, Universal Basic Services, and guaranteed minimum inheritance, along with more traditional policies to make sure workers are paid decent wages. 

“Perhaps the most important critique of degrowth is that it is possible to grow your economy and cut carbon emissions at the same time. It’s called decoupling. According to the Breakthrough Institute, since 2005, 32 countries have managed to do it, and that includes the US. Critics of degrowth say that given the right incentives, technological progress can save us and the planet. Degrowthers say that it is a complete fantasy, that there is no way that we will be able to cut emissions quickly enough.”

Any sentence starting with “according to the Breakthrough Institute” should be taken with a bag of salt (for an analysis of the organisation’s ideology, see Kallis and Bliss, 2019). To test the validity of the green growth hypothesis, we need to go beyond blog posts and back-of-the-envelope calculations and take stock of the actual science on the topic. The latest IPCC report includes a review of some of this literature (for a detail analysis of this section of the report, see Parrique, 2022) and Haberl et al. (2020) & Wiedenhofer et al. (2020) provide the most extensive systematic analysis of decoupling studies. 

I have discussed these findings many times before, so I won’t do it again here.^[14] The decoupling debate is an interesting theoretical question for us economists, but certain actors mobilise the idea of “green growth” with problematic intentions. They use it as a form of macroeconomic greenwashing, a ‘don’t worry keep growing’ message built on cherry-picked data – basically, a discourse delaying action. This is precisely the same tactics used by some politicians with the “trickle-down hypothesis.” Don’t worry about redistribution because economic growth will make wealth trickle down to the pockets of those who need it the most. Except in reality, it doesn’t.^[15]

Of course, not everyone partakes in this discursive scam. I know there are serious scholars actively working on concrete ways of greening the economy, working with concepts like circular economy, green growth, or sustainable development. To them, I say this: in terms of environmental policies, degrowth and green growth are not strictly incompatible (for more on this point, see my response to Hanah Ritchie). The benefits of producing and consuming less is that it directly reduces the use of natural resources on top of what can be achieved with eco-innovations. This would be like a diet where you cut down on fat and sugary products (degrowth) while also changing the way you eat, shifting from processed food to homemade meals (green growth).

I know it sounds paradoxical but slowing down an economy speeds up its greening. The strength of degrowth is that it impacts footprints in the here and now. Closing national flight routes means less planes in the air today, compared to technological improvements in fuel efficiency that unfolds over longer periods of time.^[16] If the most sustainable resource is the ones we can afford not using, there is a real case for minimising production and consumption as much as possible, starting with goods and services that contribute little to overall wellbeing. Compared to uncertain efficiency gains dependant on the speed and composition of technological progress, a reduction in production and consumption directly reduces production and consumption. This is why degrowth is considered a precautionary approach, one that is less uncertain than other strategies relying on technological progress. 

“But one thing both sides can probably agree on is that when it comes to cutting emissions, if we want to avoid severe environmental repercussions in the future, we’re going to have to move much faster than we are now.”

Again, if there is one thing you need to remember from this, it is that reducing greenhouse gases is not enough. This monomania with carbon creates a false sense of possibility, assuming that the trends we observe for emissions in a handful of countries could be generalised to the world for all environmental pressures. It cannot. When we factor in all the relevant environmental indicators, we realise something unsurprisingly simple: when an economy grows, it gets bigger. Even if you disagree with this, it’s difficult to dispute the fact that a smaller economy is easier to green than a bigger one.

The second takeaway message is that, regardless of what side we find the most convincing on the decoupling debate, one should recognize that the depth and breadth of each idea differ. Green growth is a concept that mainly focus on ways of decarbonising today’s economy. Degrowth, on the other hand, not only dives deeper into the various environmental dimensions of today’s crisis, but also covers a wider pallet of concerns, from social limits to growth and critiques of indicators of progress to socio-environmental inequalities and post-capitalist imaginaries – for a good overview of the degrowth/post-growth literature, see Kallis et al. (2025) and Kallis et al. (2018). 

***

It’s great to see the Financial Times discussing cutting-edge theories like degrowth. Unfortunately, such a short format doesn’t give justice to the depth and breadth of the idea. The degrowth literature is expanding at an unprecedented speed.^[17] Problems that were thought to be unsolvable a decade ago now have a variety of solutions backed by serious research. The science is available and it is useful. As the ecological situation worsens, we don’t have the luxury of snubbing potential solutions. Let’s not be the ones who died of an illness because the name of the remedy sounded silly.   

^[1] For synthetic reviews of the academic field see Kallis et al. (2018) and Kallis et al. (2025). For an extensive look at the degrowth literature, see The political economy of degrowth (2019) and The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (2022). 

^[2] To read more about the history of the term “degrowth,” see Parrique (2019, Chapter 5: Origins and definitions, pp. 171-221) and Parrique (2025, Chapter 5: A brief history of degrowth, pp. 137-166).

^[3] To only cite a few : The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) by N. Georgescu-Roegen, Post-scarcity anarchism (1971) by M. Bookchin, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973) by E.F. Schumacher, Tools for conviviality (1973) by I. Illich, The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) by C. Castoriadis, Ecology as politics (1975) by A. Gorz, The Joyless Economy (1976) by T. Scitovsky, The Social Limits to Growth (1976) by F. Hirsch, Steady-state economics (1977) by H. Daly, Écologie et féminisme (1978) by F. D’Eaubonne, or The Affluence Line (1978) by J. Drewnowski. 

^[4] “Just like a mammal is defined by a specific set of features such as hair or fur, warm-blood, milk, and vertebrae, degrowth is indissociable from the four principles of sustainability, democracy, justice, and wellbeing. A cold-blooded cannot be called a mammal. Likewise, an undemocratic downscaling of production and consumption cannot properly be called degrowth” (Parrique, 2025: p. 16). 

^[5] There are a few studies in ecological macroeconomics that estimate the magnitude of degrowth: -22% for Germany by 2033 in Gran (2017: p. 358), -50% for France by 2050 in Briens (2016: p. 277), -65% for France in Germain (2025), -5.3% per year for Australia in Kikstra et al. (2024), -2.3% per year for China in Li (2023), and between -1% and -2% per year for UE countries in Cuny and Parrique (2024) – for a more general review of post-growth macroeconomics models, see Lauer et al. (2025) and Hardt and O’Neill (2017). 

^[6] There are some empirical works that try to measure the “imperial mode of living” of high-income nations by looking at patterns of “ecologically unequal exchange.” In 2015, according to Hickel et al. (2022), for every unit of material that the global South imported from the global North, they had to export five units to pay for it (the ratio is 5:1 for land, 3:1 for energy, and 13:1 for labour). This resulted in a net appropriation of 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy (equivalent to 3.4 billion barrels of oil), and 188 million person-years equivalent of labour (equivalent to 392 billion hours of work), all in one year. In monetary terms, the global North has appropriated US$10.8 trillion from the South through this logic of unequal exchange. In other words, US$10.8 trillion worth of commodities were transferred gratis to high-income economies instead of being used to meet domestic needs.

^[7] In France, transport is the most carbon-intensive sector, responsible for 32% of the country’s territorial emissions, followed by agriculture with 19% (Insee, 2023). Looking more closely, approximately half of transport and agriculture emissions come from cars and cattle, respectively. So, beef and automobiles alone generate 26% of territorial emissions, making them good candidates for degrowth strategies.

^[8] For papers on degrowth and work time reduction, see Kallis et al. (2013), Pullinger (2014), Levy (2017), Fitzgerald and Schor (2023) – for an overview, see Parrique (2019: pp. 572-594). 

^[9] The picture gets even more unequal when we consider that the responsibility for emissions under colonial rule could be attributed to colonial rulers. For example, the proportionate French share of historical emissions rises by 51%, while it increases by 70% for the UK, 33% for Belgium, 181% for the Netherlands, and 234% for Portugal (Evans and Viisainen 2023).

^[10] There are several ways of estimating whether a country could theoretically degrow without generating poverty. One option is to calculate a monetary macroeconomic surplus. To do so, one must compare the actual national income to the minimum level of national income necessary to satisfy basic needs. Using Minimum Income Standard (MIS) methodology, it is possible to calculate reference budgets, the minimum amount of money someone needs to live decently, and aggregate these to obtain a national threshold. For example, Concialdi (2018) finds that in 2013, 58% of total household income would be necessary to satisfy the minimum needs of all French households, which means that France has a macroeconomic surplus representing 42% of its national income. In theory, France could therefore degrow without generating any poverty, as long as it does not cross that threshold. Another method consists in looking at resources rather than money. For instance, Millward-Hopkins et al. (2025) calculate that the energy necessary for achieving Decent Living Standards in Switzerland only represent 13% of the country’s current energy footprint. This means that, in theory, Switzerland could decrease its energy use by 87% without generating any poverty, if and only if that remaining energy is equitably shared. 

^[11] Starting with the seminal article of Richard A. Easterlin in 1974 (“Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence”), there is now a large academic literature that criticises the assumption that economic growth systematically raises quality of life (for a recent study, see, for example, Van der Slycken and Bleys, 2024).

^[12] According to the report “La communication commerciale à l’ère de la sobriété,” in France, only 66 000 companies (1.6% of all businesses) paid for advertising in 2019. Of these, 10 000 companies accounted for 97% of all spendings. The 2 000 largest brands who advertise control more than 85% of the market; the 500 largest concentrate 2/3 of all money spent on ads; half the market is monopolised by only 200 brands; and 1/5 of the total budget is spent by only 31 companies.

^[13] According to the French 2024 Baromètre Sobriétés et Modes de vie of Ademe (p. 45), 87% of respondents consider that “advertising is too present everywhere, all the time in our lives” and 80% of them think that ads “leads to excessive consumption.”  

^[14] A few previous texts I wrote on decoupling: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. For a synthetic summary of my views on the topic, see Parrique (2022, Chapitre 2 : L’impossible découplage) in French and Parrique (2025, Chapter 2: The impossible decoupling) in English. 

^[15] The writings of French economist Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014; Capital and Ideology, 2019) is perhaps the most convincing piece of academic work to falsify the belief that wealth organically trickles-down from the rich to the poor. For a more detailed work on growth and poverty, see Olivier De Schutter’s The poverty of growth (2024) as well as Jason Hickel’s Less is more (2021) and The Divide (2018).

^[16] Additionally, as Jason Hickel argues, scaling down certain sectors and products could liberate factors of production which could then be remobilised in projects that accelerate the ecological transition. Think of the workers, factory lines, materials and energy being wasted manufacturing gas-guzzling SUVs when they could, if that category of product were to dwindle, focus on designing high-quality, low-emission buses and trains. Said differently, the more exnovation, the faster the innovation.

^[17] For quantitative reviews of the degrowth literature, see Engler et al. (2024), Fitzpatrick et al. (2022), and Weiss and Cattaneo (2017). Be careful about the Savin and van den Bergh (2024) study, which is methodologically flawed – for a critical analysis, see Parrique (2024) and Haddaway and Fitzpatrick (2024).