Written by Olaf
Bruns and first publish at Green
European Journal
For 30
years, environmental economist Tim Jackson has been at the fore of
international debates on sustainability. Over a decade since his hugely
influential Prosperity Without Growth, the world is both much
changed – reeling from a pandemic and with unprecedented prominence for environmental
issues – and maddeningly the same, still locked in a growth-driven destructive
spiral. What does Jackson’s latest contribution, Post Growth, have
to say about the way out of the dilemma?
Tim Jackson’s
new book, Post
Growth: Life after Capitalism (Polity Press, 2021), follows his
ground-breaking Prosperity without Growth (2009, updated in
2017). Whilst the previous work reflected, partly, the austerity-driven answers
to the Great Recession, Post Growth falls into a different
world. It is a world where the recognition of climate change as the greatest
challenge facing humankind is moving towards consensus. In the United States,
even the Republican Party’s younger members are looking for ways out of the corner into which the
party has manoeuvred itself.
It is also a
world where the Covid-19 pandemic has not only taken many lives and destroyed
many livelihoods, but – via the need for state intervention – has also dealt a
blow to the gung-ho neoliberalism that is one of the main culprits of financial
chaos and the looming breakdown of planetary life-support systems.
US President
Joe Biden’s rescue plan as well as the EU’s Next Generation pandemic recovery
fund are questioning the free-market paradigm that has held sway the since the
Reagan-Thatcher area, and that had trickled down into centre-left politics as
well. In parallel, from the Paris Agreement to the European Commission’s
European Green Deal, environmental concerns that were condescendingly smiled
upon until recently have now moved centre stage. The newly discovered role for
the state and the emerging environmental consciousness might not be discussed
at length in Jackson’s new book, but they are the backdrop against which it is
to be read.
The good
life
True to the
idea of “post growth”, Jackson does not author a completely new book to join
others in trapping dust on overburdened shelves. Rather, he deepens, fleshes
out, and extends thoughts that were already present in his previous
works. Post Growth is a next step, not away from the economy,
but certainly closer to a host of other disciplines: from medical science,
psychology, sociology, and anthropology to philosophy.
In that light,
the subtitle of the book, Life after Capitalism, is chosen
carefully: it is a book about life, about the good life, and how the “myth of
growth” – the title of the first chapter – has led us astray from what actually
matters in life.
But are
philosophers the ones to turn to when the wounds of an economic crisis are
still raw, when a health crisis has just struck with unknown vehemence, and
another crisis, unimaginable in all its consequences, looms on the horizon?
Well, following
Jackson, the figures we have turned to for the past decades – mainstream
economists – are the very ones who brought us to the current conjuncture of
multi-layered crises. In the early pages, he quotes the standard bearer of
neoliberalism – and, let us not forget, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
– Milton Friedman’s infamous bon mot, “the business of business is
business”. Much of the book is dedicated to untangling the anthropological
lunacy of an economy that serves profit rather than the people, their
subsistence, and, ultimately, their purpose in life.
Limits to
growth
Capitalism, to
get the other word in the subtitle out of the way, bumps into another problem:
the limits of what planet Earth can take, what the Club of Rome already
called “the limits to growth” back in 1972. It relies on
growth and, to keep the wheel turning, on constant expansion into new
territories, commodifying whatever lies in its path. Jackson trails, with a
pinch of scepticism, Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Karl Marx here. Capitalism’s claim to
social progress depends on high growth rates to finance the redistribution of
wealth.
The wheel must
turn ever faster. However, as Jackson writes, “the peak growth rates of the
1960s were only possible at all on the back of a huge and deeply destructive
exploitation of dirty fossil fuels, something that can be ill afforded […] in
the era of dangerous climate change”. Hence the dilemma: growth either stops
fulfilling its meagre promise of prosperity for all, or it destroys the planet.
Or both.
Jackson, for
one, is doubtful that economists can shepherd us out of the impasse. He only
slightly caricatures when he writes, “their message is that only growth can
deliver us from the mess growth itself has brought us in” – but, this time, a
“green growth”, where technological innovation will allow us to “decouple” from
environmental destruction.
Green growth
hubris
While Jackson
does not deny that the destructive intensity of a given economic output can be
lowered, he reminds us that the planet does not care about relative efficiency:
what matters is humanity’s overall footprint. The equation is simple: if GDP
grows faster than emissions per given output decline, then the emissions keep
spiralling higher regardless. Hoping for a technological miracle to solve the
problem means betting on technological “efficiency” outrunning scale faster
than it has ever done in the past, and doing so indefinitely into the
foreseeable (and unforeseeable) future.
There is a call
for “ecological investment”, but altogether, Post Growth is a
little light on the question of whether another growth is possible – one driven
by health, education, culture, and community work rather than the increasing
production of stuff. Notwithstanding, Jackson’s equation is the yardstick
against which the EU’s Green Deal – sold as a “growth strategy”, and essentially one reliant on green tech – needs to be
examined.
Rather
unsurprisingly, fresh data concedes the point to Jackson. Recent
research has shown that meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals requires
that carbon emissions fall every two years by an amount equivalent to the
shrinkage caused by recent lockdowns. However, the world seems to be heading in
precisely the opposite direction.
The International
Energy Agency has shown that as soon as the first lockdowns were lifted,
emissions returned to their upward trajectory. In December 2020, carbon
emissions were already higher than in December 2019. For Jackson, green growth
is more hubris, comparable to former US President Ronald Reagan’s principled
refusal to even envisage such a thing as limits to growth.
Dead and
kicking
Perhaps prematurely,
the chapter analysing the overarching economic system asks, “who killed
capitalism?”. Jackson’s straightforward answer is capitalism itself. Its
downfall is “the result of its own obsession with growth”. Unbound
neoliberalism, untethered from rules, unbothered by purpose, oblivious to
limits, has driven us to the verge of social and ecological disaster.
Here Jackson
follows economist Wolfgang Streeck, arguing that capitalism, to the extent
that it is still around, is a dead man walking. The point, however, is that
even in intensive care, it continues to give a severe kicking to the planet and
humans alike.
This reflection
takes us to where Post Growth is at its very best: if
capitalism and its growth addiction were only trashing the planet, it would be
bad enough. But it gets truly vertiginous upon realising that capitalism also
fails to achieve its original purpose: generating happiness.
Chasing
unhappiness
In times of
shortage, more is generally good. But when there is too much, more becomes a
recipe for disaster. States pursue GDP growth based on the “assumption that
money is a good proxy for happiness”. Yet sociology and psychology tend to
corroborate the popular wisdom that “money cannot buy happiness”. Only in a few
well-defined circumstances does GDP growth trigger an increase in happiness.
However,
the evidence that
happiness increases and decreases with equality in societies is solid. Closing
the equality gap should therefore be what societies pursue, precisely for
utilitarian reasons. With a host of scientific disciplines and data, Jackson
exposes how capitalism structurally creates unhappiness. How, for example, the
food industry has gamed our in-built dopamine response to sugar and fat,
resulting in a world where “more people die of obesity than they do of
undernutrition”.
But capitalism
not only makes us fat, sleepless, burned-out, addicted to consumerism, lonely,
unhealthy, and unable to concentrate. It also hits precisely what links most of
us to the economy: work and our connection to what is produced.
Bullshit
jobs
Over a long
stretch, Jackson follows Hannah Arendt, who wrote in The Human
Condition that “there is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed
cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration. Whatever throws this
cycle out of balance (misery as well as great fortune!) ruins the elementary
happiness that comes from being alive.” Arendt’s distinction between “labour”
(roughly, the continuous activity necessary to secure our biological
maintenance), “work” (the creation of durable human artifice), and “activity”
(our social role) speaks to the anthropological need for physical work, for an
impact on the world of things and people.
Capitalism,
however, denigrates labour, undermines craft and creativity, and trashes the
intrinsic anthropological worth of objects that last. It needs to sell, always
more, and is therefore inimical to values like durability. As Jackson points
out, “the enormous success of the advertising industry has been to persuade us
that physiological needs are the very least of the functions delivered by
clothing.”
Despite all the
clapping in the early lockdowns, we still have precarious, underpaid, and
disregarded labour on the one hand, and on the other what the late
anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” that provide neither
satisfaction to the individual, nor benefit to society.
Automation will
not save us either: instead of being a way to realise the economist John
Maynard Keynes’s dream of
a 15-hour working week, it is, as Graeber argued, the very reason for the
existence of bullshit jobs. Automation could scarcely replace the
labour-intensive activities that were recognised as the backbone of society in
the early Covid period.
Care work does
not generate enough profit to attract investment – certainly not courtesy of
the markets – or pay decent wages. Returning to Hannah Arendt, Jackson reminds
us how excessive automation has deprived us of the deeply human need for
grasping and changing the world with our own hands.
Turning Kant
downside-up
Immanuel Kant’s
philosophical concept of the categorical imperative asked people to act only
according to principles they can reasonably want to become “universal law”.
Today, as sociologist Stephan Lessenich has reasoned, capitalism has turned
this imperative on its head. Industrialised societies live and consume in
such a way that they cannot hope to become universal: if it did, the breakdown
of Earth’s life-support systems would become all but certain.
Post Growth can be read as a playbook of how
to turn the categorical imperative back on its feet again, how to build a world
where equal rights to production and consumption do not ruin the planet, and
how to subordinate the economy to a broader reflection on its purpose.
“State
intervention” may no longer be a swearword, but economic stimulus to boost
growth and redistribute wealth will not achieve social progress unless paired
with a deeper reflection on work, labour, and their place in society. Society
is beginning to understand the environmental challenge, but greening the
economy will not be enough if current consumption patterns persist. On this
point, Post Growth shows the way, by placing Keynesian
economics within the limits of what the planet can take.
Neoliberalism
might have taken a hit, but it is still standing. Environmentalism might have
made some inroads, but it is still only budding. Radical questions, radical
answers, and radical policies are a historical responsibility towards the
people and the planet. It is categorical imperative against growth imperative.
Olaf Bruns is a trained anthropologist, and has been a journalist in print, online, radio, and television for over 20 years. After 5 years as deputy chief of Euronews’ Brussels office, he is now – amongst others – deputy editor-in-chief of the Progressive Post.
