Event: UN

UN agencies, academics and other policymakers have launched an alternative to what they call the ‘doomed strategy’ of economic growth. In a piece published simultaneously in Le Monde, the Guardian and El País, the authors claim that the ‘real question today is not whether growth continues, but what kind of economies we are building, who they serve and whether they allow everyone to live in dignity within planetary boundaries’. Signatories to this ‘roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth’ include Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel. Their ‘roadmap’ is typical of much contemporary growth-critical writing – it is wistful, authoritative and extremely vague about how the post-growth future can be realised. The notion of a post-growth economy can appear dotty. Yet it embodies the influential ‘progressive’ frame of mind that upholds the need for abstinence on the part of the general populace. These particular economists are among today’s best-known growth sceptics – a splendid term coined by spiked regular Daniel Ben-Ami to encompass the increasingly celebrated medley of ‘degrowthers’, ‘anti-growthers’ and ‘agrowthers’ (‘a’ is for agnostic). Predicated on the notion that humanity has breached, or will imminently breach, nature’s limits, their message is that human societies have to start curbing their economic and material development. These growth sceptics are the modern-day representatives of a long-established type of ‘progressive’ – the collection of quirky dreamers that George Orwell mocked in The Road to Wigan Pier for their sandal-wearing, fruit-juice-drinking, pacifistic proclivities. Writing more recently, Paul Laity, an editor at the London Review of Books, summed up their ‘crankish’ outlook, calling it ‘woolly-headed naivety, moral superiority and worthy bohemianism’. Today’s cohort shares the same well-meaning earnestness as previous generations, with their appeals for a fairer, less commercial and, all-in-all, happier world – a ‘beyond growth’…