Degrowth would be a revolutionary change in culture

Cultures can change pretty quickly – when they have to

Photo: Liberty Leading the People – Eugène Delacroix

A world on a degrowth path is a very different one than we have today. If our society, or even just parts of our world start on a degrowth path soon, it will change the way we live in very profound ways. But that is the point after all.

A world less focused on infinite GDP growth, on phasing out fossil fuels, on fewer cars and more public transportation, and huge changes in our relationship with work – will look unrecognizable to the theoretical time traveler that zips ahead to 2050.

I encourage people to use their imaginations to imagine such a world, and what your day might look like thirty years in the future. That kind of change need not be scary. Massive changes have happened to our world all the time. They are just in the past, so we don’t think of them as a big deal. They usually don’t happen on a single day, at one point in time, but over years. It is only when we look back that we realize things changed rather quickly.

Let’s imagine that future. Imagine a world in which some of the following things are well established facts of life:

- A four-day workweek

- Half of the cars on the road than those we have today – replaced by public transport and autonomous vehicle sharing.

- Most major cities have been remade to be more walkable, bikeable, and friendly to public transport, with an obnoxious number of parks and greenspaces available to the public.

- Universal basic income

- Public job guarantees

- Universal public services

- Products that last 3 times as long as they do now due to laws against planned obsolescence.

- One-third of the world is rewilded due to much less meat consumption.

- The meat that is consumed is largely lab grown.

- Wild animals repopulate our rewilded spaces, with cattle, pigs and sheep only 10% of their current numbers.

- High speed rail replaces short haul flights.

- Power generation is 90 percent “green.”

- No power source dominates with solar, wind, hydrogen, geothermal, hydro, and other novel technologies all playing a role.

- Population growth peaked in the early 2040s – with many job guarantees focused on elder care as the world transitions from a gray one to a population that will dip under 7 billion by 2100.

- GDP is no longer the official scorecard of nations, instead human well-being metrics dominate.

I don’t believe in Utopia.

That list above is no utopian dream. It is what can be in our transition to a steady state economy if that is what we choose. I will be writing about all the above possibilities and more in the future, but before I do that, I want to set the stage.

I want to give you permission to imagine some of the things on that list. This isn’t some kind of “if you dream it you can do it” nonsense. The book, The Secret is still a scam. I want you to start imagining a world with these things, because these are the things you can have if you really want them. And I think you should really want them, because living in a world where these things are a reality is part of the way to saving ourselves. And I would really like a four-day workweek. But maybe I’m just lazy.

Degrowth is not the way, put part of the way. And it won’t be easy. But it is possible.

It is worth imagining.

Huge earthshaking changes can happen quickly.

The French Revolution ran from 1789 -1799, and changed the world profoundly. The revolution tossed aside the monarchy in France, and marked the end of feudalism across Europe as the gentry and European oligarchs lost their power. Modern liberalism spread across Europe as the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity spread. The French revolution sparked an age of revolutions around the world, from Ireland in 1798 and the Haitian Revolution which threw off the yolk of French oppression in 1804, to revolutions in Italy and South America later in the 19^th century. The speed at which the French Revolution changed the world is even more impressive when you consider that the telegraph, which could send information instantaneously across a continent, would not be invented until the 1830s. Those messages of what was happening in France could only travel as far as a horse could run. Speaking of horses …

About 100 years ago, the automobile began to replace the horse and buggy in the United States, and around the world. It arguably took about 10 years or about 20 years for the automobile to nearly replace the horse and buggy in the United States. There were about 25 million horses in America in 1920. By 1930 there were only 19 million, and by 1940 there were only about 14 million. Think about that. In ten to twenty years, the whole transportation system in the United States changed. From Boston to Los Angeles, from Miami to Seattle and most places in between, the way people traveled in the United States and around the world changed profoundly.

About thirty years ago, when I was in college, I stood in line to sign up for a computer in the computer lab by signing my name on a paper sign-in sheet attached to a clipboard. The reason I signed up was to be in the computer lab so I could talk to a friend of mine who went through the same process at his college 1,000 miles away. We were in our respective computer labs so we could use the new technology called the internet to talk to each other by typing things on a computer and doing this new and crazy thing called e-mail. Thirty years on, it is hard to even imagine that world was real. I remember my freshman year in college, just over 30 years ago, you could call up a 1-800 number to get the scores of the baseball games, so you wouldn’t have to wait for the paper the next day. I thought it was amazing. Today, in most of the world, you can’t escape information technology even if you try.

Things can happen quickly with the right spark. That spark might be a new technology of the automobile or the internet, or it might be a revolutionary idea.

Degrowth is a massive change. But it just might happen.

Look at this list above again.

- A four-day workweek

- Half of the cars on the road than those we have today – replaced by public transport and autonomous vehicle sharing.

- Most major cities have been remade to be more walkable, bikeable, and friendly to public transport, with an obnoxious number of parks and greenspaces available to the public.

- Universal basic income

- Public job guarantees.

- Universal public services

- Products that last 3 times as long as they do now due to laws against planned obsolescence.

- One-third of the world is rewilded due to much less meat consumption.

- The meat that is consumed is largely lab grown.

- Wild animals repopulate our rewilded spaces, with cattle, pigs and sheep only 10% of their current numbers.

- High speed rail replaces short haul flights.

- Power generation is 90 percent “green.”

- No power source dominates with solar, wind, hydrogen, geothermal, hydro, and other novel technologies all playing a role.

- Population growth peaked in the early 2040s – with many job guarantees focused on elder care as the world transitions from a gray one to a population that will dip under 7 billion by 2100.

- GDP is no longer the official scorecard of nations, instead human well-being metrics dominate.

Some of these things will happen in the next few decades, some of them might happen, and some of them will only happen if a lot of us fight for them.

The median age of a person on earth is about 30 years old. Twenty-five percent of the world’s population is under the age of 15. Many of these young people see the things on that list as a better way of living. I don’t think they are wrong.

But half of the world under thirty doesn’t have much power … for now.

As we’ve seen through history, that can change pretty quickly … with the right spark.