Morgan Stanley’s “Big Debates” report seeks to answer all the big questions: is inflation peaking? Can decarbonisation targets survive the energy crisis? Are we heading for recession? Buried towards the end of this year’s “exhaustingly heterogenous pages”, sandwiched between pieces on telecoms capital expenditure and utilities decarbonisation, is a section on “degrowth”, as Bryce Elder points out on the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog. The idea is that we should deflate our economies to reduce the stress we are putting on natural resources and the climate. The number of peer-reviewed papers and Google searches on the subject has risen exponentially over the past decade, the report shows. Degrowth has become, then, “a thing”. But what kind of a thing is it? What exactly is being proposed?
Jason Hickel, one of the leading advocates of the idea, sets out his stall (with his co-authors) in a recent issue of Nature. Wealthy economies, they say, should abandon GDP growth as a goal, scale down “destructive and unnecessary forms of production” to reduce the use of energy and materials, and focus economic activity instead
