Should We Accept Degrowth as a Serious Academic Concept?

Degrowth is less a practical economic program than a rhetorical vehicle for redistribution.

In recent years, an intellectual movement known as “degrowth” has grown in popularity through the efforts of a small but growing group of academics and activists. Key texts that champion this ideology, such as Jason Hickel’s 2020 book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and Kate Raworth’s 2017 Doughnut Economics, appear on bestseller lists and in bookstores worldwide. In 2020, Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito published Capital in the Anthropocene (published in English in 2024 as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto), arguing that Karl Marx, in his later writings, anticipated the damage capitalism would do to the environment and called for rejecting unconstrained economic growth. When Saito’s book was published, it sold an unprecedented 500,000 copies in Japan alone, and it now appears in 15 languages. The degrowth paradigm has become so popular that the Autonomous University of Barcelona now offers it as a master’s degree.

Since the mainstream left and the mainstream right agree that economic growth is an important goal—they just disagree about how to achieve growth and how the proceeds should be spent—it is important to understand the appeal of degrowth.

The main motivation is, likely, ecological: concern for the damage we as humans have done to our environment. Writing this in the hot summer of 2026 as wildfires rage across much of Europe, this motivation from degrowthers is understandable. Yet, as we will see, the evidence for the relationship between economic growth and environmental outcomes is much more nuanced and mixed. Nonetheless, enthusiasm for degrowth rests on the authors’ genuine belief that we could be on the edge of various tipping points that could seriously disrupt our planetary equilibrium.

Feeding into this concern about the impact on the planet are egalitarian impulses. Degrowth is an appealing idea for those who fifty years ago would have been socialists or Marxists of some variety. Supporters of degrowth believe the global middle class is already “rich enough.” In their mind, the solution to poverty is not more growth but redirecting growth. Timothée Parrique, author of Slow Down or Die, a best-seller in France, argues that poverty is not a question of production but of allocation, and that “attempting to eradicate poverty by stimulating GDP growth is like trying to change a car’s direction by adding gas to a full tank.”

Hickel and other advocates for degrowth work backwards from the idea of a “planetary allowance” for growth, which is the additional output that they believe the planet can absorb while staying inside safe ecological limits. They argue this “allowance” should go to those earning below the global average income. What average income should be, however, remains difficult to pin down, though Hickel has suggested that the relevant benchmark should be around $24,000, as that is currently the world average GDP per capita at purchasing power parity.¹

Given how appealing degrowth arguments are to an environmentally aware younger generation, it is worthwhile addressing the former and demonstrating that degrowth rests on a series of misconceptions about economic growth and economic history.

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First, degrowthers often appeal to the simple intuition that eventually economic growth must end because continuous growth is impossible. The economist Kenneth Boulding first made the oft-repeated claim that infinite growth is impossible on a planet with finite resources (and, he added, that only a madman or an economist would think otherwise).

If growth is necessarily finite, as the argument goes, then surely the environmental stress that the planet is now showing is a sign that now is a good time to think about slowing growth down or even ending it entirely? But the claim that we should slow growth now does not follow from the claim that growth is finite. The finitude of growth tells us nothing about when growth might end. Finite might be thousands, or indeed, millions of years. It doesn’t tell us much about the prospects for growth in our own generation or for many generations to come.

Moreover, Boulding’s argument rests on a misconception: the false presumption that economic growth necessitates consuming more resources or producing more physical stuff. This mistake goes back to critics of economics who misunderstod the marginal revolution of the 1870s (i.e., the birth of modern economics). Economic growth is about value. It means producing more of what individuals value. While degrowthers associate economic growth with environmental damage, deforestation, and disregard for our natural habitat, economic growth often brings more parks, reforestation, and cleaner air. Physicists have raised a related objection. Because the Earth contains a finite stock of matter and energy, they argue, economic growth must eventually run into physical limits.

That conclusion confuses growth in economic value with growth in material consumption. As resources become scarcer and more valuable, people have stronger incentives to conserve them, use them more efficiently, recycle them, and find substitutes. Long-run economic growth can therefore increase the value people obtain from resources even as the amount of resources used per unit of value declines.

So economic growth and environmental damage are not necessarily related. Nonetheless, degrowthers can point to the damage that increased temperatures have already caused. The practical debate therefore rests on the extent to which it is possible to decouple economic growth from environmental harms. UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 were 54% below 1990 levels even as the British economy grew by approximately 84%. French emissions fell by around 32% in the same period. Degrowthers, in response, point out that some of these reductions came from shifting polluting production overseas and that global emissions have continued to rise. I think the evidence suggests that decoupling is eminently possible and, in fact, happening, but also that the huge uncertainties around future climate change mean we shouldn’t be complacent about the risks involved.

Degrowthers talk about redirecting the global economy or downscaling it. That brings us to the second misconception: the assumption that we (though who “we” are is left unspecified) currently pursue policies that seek to maximize economic growth. In this way, degrowthers blame all the myriad problems, including (perceived or real) stagnant living standards, inequality, and political polarization, not on a lack of economic growth but on the pursuit of growth.

Even commentators and journalists critical of degrowth often buy this premise; they too assume a “they” who chooses policies that maximize growth and wonder whether adding other goals alongside growth might make sense. In truth, however, there is no “we” or “they” in control of the economy. To think that that is the case is to mistake the spontaneous order of the marketplace for a machine or engine that is driven or directed by policymakers. Of course, politicians mention growth as an important outcome, but in reality they are seeking reelection. That means politicians are incentivized to pursue policies that they think will appeal to the median voter. While politicians can’t ignore the economy, the idea that they are dead set on “maximizing” growth to the detriment of other objectives cannot be seriously maintained.

Third, just as degrowthers misinterpret current policies as those intended to “maximize economic growth,” they also seriously misrepresent the history of economic growth. Hickel’s work provides the historical underpinning of the degrowth ideology. Chapter 3 of his 2018 book, The Divide, is entitled “Where did Poverty Come From?” In it, he asserts that traditional accounts of the Industrial Revolution are false. He argues that the modern world’s wealth stems not from innovation but from conquest and the establishment of an extractive world system based on colonialism and capitalism. It was this exploitation and appropriation that supposedly kickstarted the rise of the West. Indeed, according to Hickel, capitalism created “mass poverty as a historical phenomenon”. In 2023, Hickel and Dylan Sullivan published an attempt to validate this narrative empirically in World Development. If we take this work seriously, mainstream economists and social scientists have misled the public. If the origins of economic growth are in fact responsible for impoverishing millions, why wouldn’t we want degrowth?

That is, of course, a cartoon version of economic history that no specialist in the field takes seriously. Sullivan and Hickel’s most substantive evidence is simply that Robert Allen’s estimates of real wages and welfare ratios show significant declines after 1500, which is when they date the rise of capitalism in Europe. But economic historians have known for decades that living standards fell as populations recovered from the Black Death. That is consistent with a simple Malthusian model, and it tells us next to nothing about the relationship between markets, capitalism and economic growth.

Nor is that an isolated lapse by the proponents of degrowth. Economists have tried to formalize and test Raworth’s doughnut model, which describes a “safe and just space” between a social floor of basic needs and an ecological ceiling of planetary boundaries. Raworth suggests that more capitalist economies stray further from that space. A recent test found the opposite: economies with more economic freedom tend toward less imbalance, improving on social and ecological measures together rather than trading one off against the other.

Critics of degrowth, including economists who are sympathetic to the goals of redistribution and egalitarianism, have commented on its infeasibility. Branko Milanović, for example, notes that even though degrowthers believe in economic growth for the poorest in the global economy, their proposals would require some 86 percent of people in currently rich countries to reduce their standards of living. As Milanović rightly notes, the idea that citizens of rich countries would accept such cuts voluntarily and democratically is pure magical thinking.

That brings us to a fourth fallacy committed by the degrowth movement: the idea that degrowth can be achieved without mass coercion and violence.

The reality, of course, is that degrowth would require a massive increase in governmental organization and intervention in the economy. Parrique asks: “Should every company make a profit? Should we let the markets decide what we produce?” The implicit answer is “no,” for as Parrique continues: “degrowth is planned—meaning it is democratically discussed with society and organized in advance by public authorities and the economy’s stakeholders according to a plan.”

And so, the degrowthers return to the errors made by socialist planners in the 20th century. Degrowthers talk about broadening human capabilities, individual freedom and collective self-realization. “Let’s draw up plans for the boldest utopias without fearing the changes they will impose,” writes Parrique. But the rest of us have heard such calls for revolutionary action before. Needless to say, they have ended badly.

Or perhaps degrowth is not meant to be taken seriously. That is, degrowth is more of a political slogan than a serious academic concept. The radical policies required to reduce the living standards of the middle classes in developed economies would be so politically infeasible that degrowth advocates tend to retreat from the bailey of actual degrowth to the motte of more generic proposals for global redistribution.

Indeed, in The Divide, Hickel ends by arguing for quite run-of-the-mill left-leaning policies such as universal basic income or replacing GDP measures with GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator). His more recent book, Less is More, is subtitled How Degrowth Will Save the World. But it similarly ends with fairly normal left-wing proposals. Understood this way, degrowth may be less radical than it seems, and is more a way of shifting the rhetorical backdrop of policy debates in favor of more redistributive and left-wing policies.

1. World GDP per capita was $24,248 in 2024, measured at purchasing power parity (World Bank). But GDP per capita is not household income: it also counts investment, government spending, depreciation, and retained corporate earnings, and so runs several times higher than what households actually receive. A more accurate measure of average household income is the one used by Branko Milanović, who puts the global mean at $PPP 16 a day, or roughly $5,800 a year. See Branko Milanović, “Degrowth: Solving the Impasse by Magical Thinking,” Global Inequality and More, April 28, 2021. Hickel uses the GDP per capita benchmark himself: in his 2017 reply to Milanović he put world average GDP per capita at $17,600 (PPP) and called it “not dystopic.”