Can Degrowth Save the Planet?

Hello, producer Jerniprimo here, and today we have a wonderful conversation on D-growth. If you need a reminder of how the show works in part 1, this episode, Emile and the guests will analyze the topic in depth, covering all the important and controversial points, and in part 2, next week, Lloyd will meet the guests on the couch for a more personal and unfiltered chat. As always, if you find some value in the show, please don't forget to leave us a rating, it really helps us out. Enjoy the conversation. [Music] Welcome to Principle of Charity. I'm Lloyd Vogelman and I'm here with my cousin and buddy Emile Sherman. We here to inject some generosity and curiosity back into our conversations. Principle of charity tells us to seek the truth, not win the fight, to first put aside our own views and try to understand the other viewpoint before we instinctively reject it. And now to this episode's Principle of Charity Personal Challenge. If there's one thing both business and mindfulness have taught me, it's the immense value of small, consistent improvements. James Clear in his book Atomic Habits articulates this beautifully. He writes, "We often convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. However, the reality is that tiny incremental changes made daily can lead to extra ordinary outcomes over time. And so, when it comes to applying the Principle of Charity in our daily lives, the trick is to practice it every day in small ways. The key to making the Principle of Charity a habit is to start with small, intentional actions every day. We can, for instance, challenge ourselves once a day to listen to an opposing viewpoint without immediately dismissing it or privately reacting with phrases like nonsense or hush it. It's in these small moments that we build habits and over time, these habits multiply their positive effects. Practicing a small charitable behavior daily could turn us into true practitioners of the Principle of Charity. And so doing, we can make a small contribution to reducing polarisation and creating a more understanding world. And so, the Principle of Charity Personal Challenge this week, can we make Principle of Charity a habit? And Emil, before you tell us about today's topic, how are you doing on making the Principle of Charity a habit? It's always difficult, isn't it, Lloyd? And you know, what really resonated with what you were saying was just the value of sort of marginal improvements. I think it's so easy to say, I'm not perfect. I think there's a danger in this perfectionist thinking, isn't there? Utopian thinking where I'm not perfect. So you mustn't be working. So I need to throw all this out and try something radically new. And sometimes that's needed. But the remind me of Hans Rosling's book, the epidemiologist who talked about how the world is getting better, but it's still not good. And it's sort of bad, but better. And if you have that sort of totalist thinking, you're likely to go, well, it's still bad. So we need to throw everything out. But actually, the pathway forward might be just continually making small improvements. Now, you know, it depends on the circumstance. But I do love Tyler Cowan's phrase and the name of his podcast and blog, marginal revolution. There's something beautiful about those two words coming together. Fantastic. Let's get on to the topic for today. Thank you, Lloyd. The topic today is, will degrowth save the planet? Now one thing that unites most people across the political divide and across nations is that having more money is on the whole better than having less. We know money can't buy everything. But it certainly can buy a whole lot of things we value, you know, from essentials like housing, healthcare, education, to pleasure of all, like travel, nice food and entertainment. It can even arguably buy us leisure time, time we can use to spend with family and friends. And there's no better driver of wealth of economic growth than capitalism, which has fueled the West and now much of the rest of the world out of abject poverty. I was looking at some statistics and as recently as 150 years ago, pretty much everyone was living in what we today call extreme poverty. And today that rate is 9% with a reduction from 38% in the last 30 years alone. So what's the problem? Well for one thing, we have been plundering the natural world to fuel our growth with little regard for its limitations. And it's come back to buy us big time with amongst other things climate change. A regular economist might say no problem. Let's just price in the cost of climate pollution, recognizing that we'll need governments to take the leaders markets are not good at pricing in the comments. Well, there's been a challenge to that market centric response from a number of movements. And they all share a belief that a bit more government regulation is not going to get to the root of the problem. And that the root really is our approach to the natural world, which is all wrong. It's based on an erroneous assumption that it's limitless. And they say we need to shift our mindset from focusing on unlimited economic growth to a sustainable, even green growth that recognises not just the limitations of the natural world as a resource, but the sort of importance to see the natural world as the home in which we live and to value it for its own sake. Now the most extreme of these movements, although they know doubt, see themselves as the most saying, is the one we're exploring today called degrowth. It says that we can't save the planet or end the systemic ills of capitalism like inequality, which we'll get to as well, using the tools that created the problem in the first place. That our addiction to growth, in fact, needs to be cut at its roots. As it's that addiction itself, which has seen as value, the destruction of the natural world and exploit the labour of workers, particularly those of the global south. So they argue the degrowth movement for a paradigm shift, which sees well-being uncoupled with economic growth. They envisage a different way of being, of caring and relating to each other, of flourishing itself. That's in harmony with our more noble instincts, unperverted by our current system of exploitation. Now before Lloyd introduces our great guest, I just add that the impetus for this topic myself was in realizing that our population replacement levels are so low in the developed world, and decreasing rapidly in the rest of the world, that the main basic unit of economic growth or the driver being working age people is going to decline. And so we may be heading for degrowth, whether we like it or not. So I'm hoping in this episode to explore not just the pros and the cons of growth in degrowth, but to see if there are some helpful ways that degrowth can reframe our idea of flourishing lives to help us embrace a future where growth may in fact be a thing of the past. Lloyd, tell us a little bit about our guests. Emile, our two guests today are Jean Tani and Anita Nelson. Let me tell you a little bit about Jean first. Jean is the founder and director of Adapt Economics and an adjunct fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. He's a former Australian Treasury official. He has taught economics at various universities, including the University of Queensland, where he also lectures to foreign government officials on areas pertaining to international development. He is a regular economics commentator in Australian and international media, and he runs the podcast, Economics Explored. Our other guest is Anita Nelson. Anita is an activist scholar affiliated with the Informal Urbanism Research Hub at the University of Melbourne. She is a co-editor, author and joint author of numerous books on degrowth and a core focus, Emile, of a niche scholarly work has been on housing and life without money. And in line with these themes, in 2018, Anita authored a book on eco-collaborative housing, titled Small Is Necessary Shared Living on a Shared Planet. Emile, let's bring on the guests. Well, Anita and Jane, welcome to Principal of Charity. Anita, I'm going to start with you. The degrowth movement seems to have quite a tough sell as a sort of swimming upstream against our current cultural and economic norms, where most people think that more growth means more money. More money means more ability to live the lives we want to live in and choose the things we want to do. It's the government which spends money on hospitals, schools, sports stadiums or the arts or us as individuals spending money on holidays, gym membership or entertainment. Money is the great store of value exchange. And for most people, the big challenge actually is how to keep growth going in the face of the headwinds we have such as lower productivity and increased technology. So what is degrowth? What problem is it aiming to solve? And what gives you the confidence that reducing growth will in fact solve rather than exacerbate the problem? Degrowth is about transforming away from an economy centered on growth and away from money making more money, with all of its enormous social and ecological costs. So that two great challenges that are facing people right across the world today are inequities and unsustainability. And degrowth addresses these challenges directly. Degrowth is society designed around modest production and consumption free of waste. It's about conviviality, a human and earth-centered, nature-centered future. It's about designing localised but open and networked economies where people maximise quality of life, cultural richness and diversity. It's also about a real democracy where all people directly make decisions about how they live, grow and make things for their collective sufficiency and sustainability. So it's quite different from a market society that we live in. And while growth is all about monetary, quantity, hierarchy and scaling up, decoase is about quality of life and nature, equality and nature's limits. I mean, paint is an incredibly beautiful picture of that sort of future. But don't we need money to achieve some of those things? You see, I mean, is it opposed, is it uncoupled with economic growth? And aren't we able to achieve some of those things through having more rather than less financial resources? I think that there are aspects of the growth economy, sectors of a growth economy, which will naturally not only remain but be expanded in a de-growth future. But those, there are many different kinds of sectors that are damaging to the environment and damaging to people. And under current circumstances, these are just accepted as part of a market economy, very lightly regulated and part of the count of GDP. And we think that we need to be a lot more judicious about the kinds of economic activities that we have, because this is what is producing the problem that we have with climate change. Carbon emissions are really just the typical iceberg of the ecological problems that we have. So it's basically setting our minds on these massive challenges and what it can tell us about the current way that we approach our economy and how we might better deal with creating a future that is a lot more sustainable. So it's sort of in favour of growing the parts of the economy that aren't extractive of the natural world or is it de-growing everything because the whole system itself of growth produces poor effects. No, it's not about de-growing everything. And in actual fact, de-growth has a very fundamental principle of equality. So all of those people who are disadvantaged and in Australia, where the average Australian actually uses the equivalent of four planets worth. Okay, of what the planet is capable of regenerating, we have to be looked in yet, more modest production and consumption. Yet at the same time, in a growth economy, perversely, we actually have a lot of homeless people. We have a lot of disadvantaged people, even people who are not getting enough or the right kind of food to eat. So de-growth actually addresses that as well. It sees equity as really important alongside modifying production and consumption. And yeah, it seems like inequality is the other core principle of the de-growth movement trying to remedy the ills of inequality. Isn't there a danger that we might just all end up poorer rather than actually the poor end up with more resources? Because the idea of growth is that the poor and the people who are struggling benefit, but they benefit unequally. Like, how do you see that trade off? If you believe there is a trade off between inequality and just helping the people in need. De-growth is about putting social and ecological values at the centre of the picture. Whether that is via having non-monetary economies or having monetary economies that are acting in a highly regulated kinds of ways. So before I get to you, Gene, I just want to touch one more time and each with just on spelling out these differences because many people have heard about sustainable growth, green growth, which seem to be more about supporting the idea of growth, but in a sustainable way away that recognises the collective home in which we all live. De-growth goes one step further, doesn't it? It's a different philosophy to that sustainable growth movement. Yes, we don't believe that sustainable development is actually possible. In terms of green growth, also there are massive problems in simply replacing. We have a current infrastructure and ways of producing and consuming with more renewable ways. So you have to have new infrastructure, which means that we actually can be going ahead now and damaging more earth and causing more inequalities in the process. So for us, it is important to move to renewable ways of using energy and being in the world, but we need to be doing that in concert with minimizing and you can't actually do that in a growth economy. So it has to be a conscious and planned approach. So this green growth movement is caught in a paradox or a trap where it tries to grow itself out of the ills of capitalism but using the tools and it sort of just gets caught on itself. You can't. You just keep digging down. Jean, before we look at these challenges, I'd love you to just step back and make the case for capitalism and for growth. Why does increasing wealth improve our lives and what actually happens when societies become poorer? Thanks, Emil. I mean, generally there is a correlation between GDP per capita, so your income per capita and a range of indicators such as living standards and to an extent happiness. I mean, you do get diminishing returns beyond a certain point. So there's there are empirical studies of that. But generally, I mean, the wealthier countries have higher life expectancy. I mean, somewhere like Australia with where life expectancy is or I don't know, 83, or 84 years or whatever it is, I have to check the latest statistics compared with emerging economies with much lower life expectancy. Again, it's been a while since I looked at the data, but if we pulled up the UN development stats, we'd probably see life expectancy in 60 years or something in very low income countries in Africa. So look, there's definitely a case for growth. Now as an economist, I'm not one to fetishize economic growth. I mean, what matters ultimately is the well-being of the population and the utility that economists as economists would call it. And so to an extent, growth helps us achieve those things, but it's not as if we're saying we need to have this certain economic growth rate. And it's not as if we're all like iron, rand and just celebrating the virtues of capitalism. Or we think, I mean, I think capitalism has delivered a lot of gains. There have been negatives associated with it. You can't really deny that. I think people can take for granted the goods that capitalism has produced. Yes. And before we go into its limitations, what can wealth buy us that we see is valuable? Oh, well, health care, education, the range of consumption goods, holidays, quality housing. I mean, think about a place like Brisbane where the quality of housing today, I mean, I wasn't born then, but back in the, I think the 50s and 60s, people still had septic tanks. I mean, we didn't have proper sewage in the suburbs in Brisbane. So it's higher quality of life, which has led to an explosion in big improvements in life expectancy, people living longer. So all sorts of benefits. An entrepreneurialism and capitalism really does, it allows innovation, it allows creativity. And there's no other real system that does that. I mean, you stifle that innovation and productivity. And capitalism is, it actually means people cooperate and trust each other. And our honest, there's an incentive to be honest, really. I mean, there are people who are bad actors clearly, but capitalism is a great way of organizing, of organizing people, solving production problems. Frederick Hayek talked about the knowledge problem in societies. How do you actually coordinate all of this production? How do you know what the best allocation of resources is? And the market, you know, solves that quite well rather than some central planner in a socialist system where, I mean, how do you coordinate all of the range of activities to to produce modern products like an iPhone or even a pencil or a or even things we think are rudimentary when you think about the massive amount of inputs that have to go into them. So it's that sort of story that is the great virtue of capitalism being able to organize production, marshal, all of the innovation, the entrepreneurial efforts and the hard work of people across the globe really. If you think about how vast supply chains are now, money doesn't capture everything, but it is the store of value and our signal of how much we value things across all the things that money can buy and money can buy an enormous amount of things in our economy and can even buy free time sometimes. It can even work with the environment to buy ecological heritage sanctuaries. Like where do you see the limits of what money can and can't buy? - Oh, well, didn't the Beatles tell us that? I mean, I mean, they can't buy me love. There are certainly limits to money. But yeah, the point you're making is a good one now. If we go back to Adam Smith, I mean, Smith, Adam Smith, the founder of economics, I mean, how he thought about it is generally if you have a voluntary exchange and exchanges involving money, there's a presumption that that is going to be welfare enhancing for both parties, okay? If it's voluntarily entered into. And so therefore, I mean, Adam Smith had the idea of the invisible hand, people pursuing their own self interest leads to the collective collective good. Now, the limits to that, of course, are that me money can help us, you know, ultimately get consumption goods, but there are a whole range of needs that we have as human beings that aren't met by consumption goods alone. And so I think that's where the limits are, right? So just as follow-up question, you know, focusing specifically on the environment that this main challenge of degrowth is that capitalism is ill-equipped to manage the environment properly. And that we can't just go on extracting our natural resources indefinitely. So how do you respond to that challenge? Can we moderate capitalism with sustainable growth in a way that will save the planet, you know, without the need for actual degrowth? - Well, my view is that we can, and we are attempting to do that. Now, I think there are, we have to be specific about the issues we're dealing with. And this is one of the concerns I have with the concept of degrowth, because I mean, you know, nature has got to, may have a different view, but my sort of interpretation is I'll look, the problem is overall GDP growth, and you've, we've essentially got to shrink the economy because the GDP growth is correlated with all of these bad outcomes. And you just got no hope of fixing them up anyway, any other way. But I mean, I'd say that we are trying to do our best to address those environmental challenges that we have. And I think we've made some improvements. I mean, we can certainly do more, but we seem to have stopped, you know, biodiversity loss to it extent. I mean, there is some data that show we are making some gains there. I mean, we've slowed the rate. We've, you know, we're cleaning up rivers and air quality is much better in many cities in the Western world. So I think we are actually making some gains. There is the issue of climate change where, I mean, we need a global carbon price arguably to really incentivise people in the economy, corporations to reduce emissions over time. Now that's challenging because it depends on what other countries are doing. There's a, we all know the challenges with that. But I mean, my view is that we can address those issues without degroing the economy. And I mean, indeed, we're trying to do that. And I think there have been some successes. Well, in nature, you know, focusing a bit more on climate change now, there's this techno optimist viewpoint, you know, which says that to solve the climate crisis in the way that James talking about, we sort of need more innovation, not less and more money and innovation cost money. The more we can grow our economies, as long as that growth is green and sustainable, the better a position will be to solve the climate crisis. You know, we also know and you talked about how CO2 emissions per person are so much higher in rich countries. But when we look at total emissions, the US and Europe emit only 31% of global totals. And that's share I imagine will just decrease as Asia and the global South become richer. So do you think there's a danger that degrowth with, which is focused on the rich world will just sort of dampen the engine of innovation and of economic growth that we need to help solve the problem of climate in the first place, whether for the North and South. Carbon emissions have risen, you know, in line with capitalist expansion over the world. And I think that there's a real problem in looking at a kind of carbon emissions country by country because they don't adequately, usually, in the data, take into account imports and exports and the kind of trading dynamic. So and also looking nation by nation, rather than per capita, is clearly unfair like in terms of population and those kinds of things. Like carbon emissions aren't actually decreasing. We're not actually making the real gains we need to be making. At the moment, in fact, we're actually on track, if you look at the graphs, with non-renewable energy increasing. I mean, we're actually are in a really, really difficult position. So I can't see growth economies actually achieving the kinds of benefits that people say that they are achieving. We can show in the actual data that they're not. And what we're looking at in deep growth is not everything decreasing. It's, as I said, certain sectors of the economy are increasing. Certain activities that people do are increasing, especially around regenerating earth. And you'd have a slower economy. So people are less stressed out, all of those kinds of things. And where does that line fall between trying to reduce the resource extractive side of the economies and at the same time support and fuel the other side? You know, when you think of just the consumer goods and the economy we have that supports growth in buying things, things we often don't even need, they might not be specifically aimed at resource extraction, but the more we buy, the more factories we need, the more, I mean, the economy is so entwined. What areas of the economy do we need to support and keep growing that doesn't affect the environment? I think it's the ways that we produce that are really important to look at. So food sovereignty movements that support small and local production of food are really important to replace all of the unnecessary kind of consumption when we walk into supermarkets, which is often not healthy foods. If so, degrowth is very much about localized economies and it's very much about people directly producing, which is not self-sufficiency, but we talk about collective sufficiency. So people working more in collectives. We're looking at community supported agriculture, these kinds of local supply chains, which are environmentally better because they don't involve such amounts of transport. But there are also ways where people can actually see how much people are working in particular areas and understand that they need to be remunerated or to have their standards of living the same as yours. So those are some of the ways that we're looking at. And you know, there are examples of a decal, we call them decal formations where people get together with a whole series of collective activities, making repairing bikes, using cargo bikes for community supported agriculture, community gardens, forestry, urban forests, all of these kinds of things. And is this sort of represent 10% of, you know, a change to 10% of our economic activity or this has changed to 60%. So I'm trying to get a sense of how much this is at the fringe and how much this is about overhauling the way, you know, my monitor that I'm looking at now is made or my, I think it's in the long term, it's about overhauling. In the short term, we change only happens sort of slowly and there's a lot of degrowth experimentation at a grassroots level to see what kinds of changes can be made, which are going to be the most successful that kind of thing. And there's a lot of interaction within the degrowth movement over these kinds of. So there'll be experimentation and working out what works. I mean, you concern there's a danger of localizing, in localizing supply change and supply chains and making the more community-based. that basically the prices will just go up and so will negatively affect people who are the most disadvantaged. Well this can be the case if you're looking at using a market economy but a lot of these experiments are looking at different forms that actually go outside market economies. And for example with the community supported agriculture case where monetary amounts are needed by a gagal or cluster of people who are involved as you know prosumers, they're involved with production and in consuming. They will actually have auctions so it's more like seeing how much people who have a wealthier or have better income flows will offer more to support the group than those people who don't have work or have very little work or are mothers who are breastfeeding or whatever. So they're looking at ways of also breaking out of the market mold and breaking away from prices because as you say you actually get caught in this very vicious cycle if you're starting with niche markets the economic dynamic itself forces that to be a higher a higher price. So this doesn't get us away from the problems that we're trying to solve. Yeah when I was researching this topic and degrowth I thought some of the most interesting parts of it were the most philosophical or fundamental. It's about a very different way of looking at how place in the world as human beings a sort of non-dualist way away where we're not you know we don't see the natural world as an object there to be extracted for our benefit we don't see other people I mean it's obviously deeply anti-capitalist which is based on the idea that you know we there's a gap between capital and labor and we need to extract as much value as we can from labor the animal world as well. Can you talk a little about the most fundamental paradigm shift in the way we see our relationship between ourselves and our communities the natural world the animal world. Yeah so I think it has a lot of parallels with indigenous ways of looking at the world it's more of a relational kind of way of seeing the world where we're looking at caring people and caring for the earth and we're looking at their needs particularly given the challenges at the moment of actually repairing earth and repairing people as well from a lot of the stresses. I mean for example when I was a child the average family had three children and two parents were supported by one parent going to work. Nowadays you know supposedly everything's more modern and it's better but you've got a typical family with two children two parents working. I mean there are there are things that are inexplicable except people once you actually speak with them. Yes I know this the way that we're being in the world is actually achieving the kinds of things that we want which is actually to enjoy nature more enjoy one another more. We're told we're wealthier but then we go hold on there's a dissonance between our GDP per capita and and the lives we live. So in a sense it sounds like you're prepared to accept a trade off. I mean let's assume for a moment there is a trade off but that you're prepared to accept one between being a little less wealthy but understanding and experiencing our place in the world in a way that's more conducive to our noble instincts and to caring and altruism a sort of valuing of different things because at the moment the sort of over valuing of money means that we can end up congratulating ourselves that we've got a bigger house where both people are working you know 12 hours a day but we're sort of missing the point somehow. Yes and and I like you also pointing to technology because we have this term convivial technology so conviviality is really important term indeed growth because of course it means enjoying the company of other people but it also means everyone putting in as well as you know getting something out of experiences and in terms of technology the bike is a good example of convivial technology people can see how you make a bike easily they're usually easily repaired by people it's not a technology that's difficult to understand they're relatively durable and they don't cost the earth a lot or and they don't cost a lot of human labor either to make or keep repairing etc and so these are the ways that we judge technologies it's really what is this technology demanding in terms of the earth demanding in terms of people and what are the benefits that people and also what are the implications for earth of keeping on using them the way that we do and one of the problems with green growth is is that we're looking at needing a lot more rare earth exploration and that's actually having a massive impact in terms of Australia and perversely rather than seeing this as problematic because we're exploiting more earth this has actually seen as wow Australia will be able to grow in the future due to all this exploitation so deep growth is just like really turning everything upside down and really looking every time what are the ecological and the social implications of what we're doing Jane you know even if we accept that degrowth can work so let's just put that on the side for the moment it still seems to be based on a value system that sees equality as more important than that sort of pure definition of freedom of sort of negative freedom as it's hard to imagine degrowth without some quite strong societal restrictions or government regulation can you talk a little about that tension I've noted that you you've written a bit about it and is freedom itself under capitalism you know largely illusory as workers maybe physically free but economically compelled to accept what a boss wants from them yeah that's a good question Emil just before I answer that because it sure just about the point about the benefits of capitalism and your comment before about the cost of locally produced goods and services I thought was a was a you know it was a good point to rise and ask about and it got me think in terms of what it means for the poorest I mean one of the advantages of say capitalism in the last few decades has just been the immense shift out of extreme poverty of over one billion people globally they call it the the great surge I mean particularly since globalization took off from around 1990 or so you know massive increase in global capital global investment and trade flows and I mean China opening up to the market economy under Deng Xiaoping so that's part of the story too just that massive you know lift out of extreme poverty I mean grinding poverty and increase improvements in life expectancy and health you know you're right you know global inequality from what I can understand has decreased massively with the enormous rise of wealth and and the movement of people in abject poverty out of abject poverty in in Asia with China obviously keep out of it has capitalism created more inequality or has it reduced inequality there seems to be I mean this is a fundamental tension I think between these two world views and is inequality a problem in and of itself or is the more important issue poverty yeah look I think this is where economists will talk about positive economics versus normative economics and you're asking me a question about is inequality a problem well I mean it's a problem if if you're poor and you don't have access to healthcare education from a societal point of view that's a value judgment and generally I think the societies we're living into the extent that you can come up with a notion of what society values as a whole we do we do value I mean we accept some inequality but we want to minimize that while allowing the economy to flour and people to flourish and have freedom and so we make choices you know different societies make different choices and Australia has you know extensive degree of redistribution we have the tax welfare system the NDIS which is I mean it's costing us a lot of money but I think most Australians have come to the view that they're but for the grace of God go I and so there is a value in in making sure that we are looking after people who are in need so I think as a society we've made a judgment that we will address inequality to an extent now different societies will make different judges United States for whatever reason, I mean partly to do with their political system is made a different judgment and the US is one country where inequality, if you look at the incomes of the top, you know, 0.1%, or top 1%, I mean they are, they have massively surged. And partly that's because of technological change, the internet, providing a larger market. So I think what's challenged economists and you probably seen the work by Picard E, Thomas Picard E, the French economist, there were the 30 glorious years after the end of the second world war where wages, real wages, rising societies appeared to becoming more equal. There wasn't a lot of concern about inequality, there was a standard sort of way of life, you know, there were issues with that of course, I mean, but since sort of, I guess the age of globalization and the internet, so they were similar in the contemporaneous in time, yeah, there has been a rise in inequality in the United States, I think is quite marked, that it's quite, you know, very significant. And I mean, to an extent, the US is starting to look like developing economies in a way, or Latin American countries, because what economists thought is that as economies became more advanced, that inequality would decline. So in the process of economic development, there'd be a surge in inequality, as some people get ahead and others don't, and then it'd gradually decline, as people get richer. So there's a use-shaped relationship, this cussness, perv idea. But yeah, that doesn't seem to be the case in the. It didn't play out in the US, but has it played out in other countries, and is that just because of welfare redistribution, or is there something about the capitalist engine of growth, which actually grows the poorest people as the economy requires more labor and labor ends up being more valuable? Well, I think that's certainly part of it. I mean, you know, it depends on the type of economy we're talking about, but I mean, China, like you look at all of the people who leave the agrarian areas. I mean, the process of economic development is partly making people more productive, taking them out of unproductive uses in agriculture and moving them, moving them to the cities. So yeah, look, it's complicated, and the data can be difficult to interpret some of these data. Well, let's go back to the earlier question about the tension between equality and freedom, and whether there's a sort of libertarian value of freedom that even if the growth could help us, would be too affronting to certain people. Well, that would be my value judgment. So I'm a adjunct fellow at Center for Independent Studies in Sydney, which is, you know, motivated or inspired by the ideas of Frederick Hyak, you know, Nobel Prize winning economists who had some great insights into the economic process and the values, the virtues of freedom and the market economy in terms of organizing production, because there's just so much information and data, so much unknown that's out there to people about things we probably think of as mundane, that you need a market system to be able to coordinate all this production for the good of everyone. So yes, my value judgment is that, I mean, there is a virtue in freedom and allowing us to be entrepreneurial. And, you know, I've made that judgment personally. I mean, I'm self-employed, I've got a business, but look, other people can have different value judgments, and that's what we have to resolve through the political process. Yeah, yeah. And, Etra, so you talked a bit about this upfront, but the degrowth movement offers this vision of a world that's more democratic with people working collaboratively rather than being rewarded financially from extracting value from each other. And it's a very alluring, in a sense, utopian theory. But when I look at the reality of countries where growth has stagnated or even has retreated, it generally doesn't bear much resemblance to that vision. Usually, as countries become poorer, there seems to be more rather than less infighting, and it means that the conditions can become right for populist, even truly authoritarian regimes to take control, you know, and these are regimes that can be more exploitative than the capitalist democracies we live in today. So like, how concerned are you about this dystopian vision of degrowth as a force for democratization? And how do you think we can avoid that pathway? In terms of degrowth, yes, a lot of people confuse degrowth with austerity or the bust of capitalism. Capitalism is characterized by booms and busts. And people will argue for growth, we'll always look at the booms and not the busts, but the busts are part of capitalism. And that's we're not arguing for a growth economy, which has booms and busts. We're not arguing for austerity. We are asking for managed minimization of the throughput of materials and energy when it comes to production and consumption. And democracy is really important there. It's really important the communities themselves decide where do they want to minimize their use of energy and materials. So there's a way of doing that, which brings along the democratic process for the right and even doubles down on democratic process rather than risking economic decline, which I mean, would you agree that economic decline can fuel more infighting and the sort of desire for more populist, even autocratic regimes? Is that a concern? For sure. And there's that kind of collapse that we're facing on a consistent basis. Right. That actually got a housing crisis. We're back in Australia. If you look at the papers, all listen to the news, social media, people are finding it a struggle to pay for ordinary everyday means of existence. We'll move on to poverty, I think, if you wanted to touch on that. Olivia De Shuta, he's the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. And his latest book is on the poverty of growth. And like he literally argues that we have to fundamentally rethink the fight against poverty. That growth clashes with the need to remain within planetary boundaries. And he argues that growth has created the exclusion. It was intended to cure. So he says it erodes human rights, widens inequality, and you know, he talks about a modernizing form of poverty because everyone is comparing themselves with other people. There's a trickle down theory, but very, very little trickles down. And if you actually have a look at the latest Oxfam state of inequality report, 2023, you can see these extremes. They're growing. But you deny that capitalism and economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of object poverty in Asia, including China. There's a lot of controversy over this. And you'll actually find that for instance, if we go back to the 19th century, okay, we look at people who came from Britain and settled in Australia. There are works that show, and this was the beginnings of industrialization. People who were coming and settling here had worse conditions in Britain than Aboriginal people who were living a traditional life did here. Yeah, yeah. So it's a sort of reframing of values. What motivated me to do this episode wasn't just the sort of perils of climate change in inequality, but it's the impending and some would say cataclysmic projections for population decline in the developed world once we peak in 2050. And at the moment, replacement rates in richenations are generally far below replacement level. And I read that by 2053 quarters of countries will have below replacement fertility rates. But even just looking at the rich world now, it's hard to imagine how the engine of growth can continue with the decline in working age people. And so for me, what's extra interesting about degrowth is that we may be in a degrowth world whether we want to be or not. How do you think about a future which may likely have a much lower or even negative growth? And how can we reorganize our societies in our values so that we can reframe a low or no growth economy as one that can fully allow for human flourishing? And do you think degrowth has some answers to that? What you're talking about is something that is beyond the range for which we can plan really. I mean, as a globe, we're going to experience growing population up until, I don't know, 70s or 2080s or maybe the. We're not growing working age. I mean, it's sort of growing older people, isn't it? the engine of growth is fast declining? - Yes, yes, yes. - To an extent, but there's also productivity gains in innovation. So if you think about, like my old boss Ken Henry in the Treasury, he had the three P's framework which was population, participation, and productivity. So, you know, populations, one of those P's and that's what you're talking about, right? So we're having to declining working age population. I mean, we don't, as of yet, largely, you know, to a large extent because of immigration. So, immigration's one of the ways that you can have that. - You need a lot of immigration too. And you need to, you need to pedal very hard, don't you, if one of the P's is sort of falling off the cliff? - Yes, yeah, exactly. But there's also productivity growth where we become more innovative, we improve production processes, we have new technologies over time. And that has been, the contribution has declined, but essentially it adds another one percentage point to your economic growth in addition to what you're getting from population and participation so the utilisation of labor force. So, we're not there yet. I mean, Japan certainly is there. And I mean, Japan's still a high income country, but yep, they've had economic challenges. There's no doubt. I think we will manage as a society. It's not something that I'm super worried about at the moment. I mean, it's, you know, distant in the future, really to be concerned about as an issue for Australia. The best way to deal with it is through the market. I mean, I think we get ourselves into trouble when we start thinking, "Oh, how are we going to solve this problem?" Well, we don't need a central planner. We just need to rely upon individuals and businesses working these things out. That's not to deny that government policy has a role in terms of setting the rules and appropriately pricing or regulating externalities where they occur, but generally, I think, would be better off just, you know, letting the market resolve these issues, letting people solve them with their own ingenuity. And nature, just a final question for you before I hand over to Lloyd. But I'd love to focus a little more on the genuine paradigm shift of values, that degrowth challenges us to embrace. So, we know that capitalism with money is the unit of exchange, influences our culture so that we tend to overly value the things that can be measured, which is through money. And there are a pretty broad, great group of things, aren't they? You know, education we've talked about, healthcare, innovation, food, entertainment, our careers, so much, we hold deers valued in money, but there's so much left out of GDP, things like our role as carers, our altruism, time with friends, family, community, appreciation of nature, all of which are so important to us as humans. So, could you talk about the things that a GDP-obsessed economy tend to undervalue? And do you think flourishing is entirely or mostly unrelated to money? I know you've thought about these things so deeply and have written that much praise book beyond money, a post-capitalist strategy. - Basically, the problem is, is that prices don't, and they're not meant to value social import and ecological import or social implications and ecological implications. They're a kind of distributive mechanism that's created within all of their economic relations that are clustered within a market economy. So sometimes when we think of the price of things, we see that as value, but monetary value is quite a different beast from other kinds of values. And that doesn't mean that people don't contest what social values are or ecological values. There'll be lots of conflicts over that, but there's a direct relationship to reality as a concrete material reality. We can see trees and we can see human beings that kind of thing. Whereas prices and the way that they are created has to do with a lot of conflictual social forces between people. So in many ways, when we talk about degrowth, we're trying to imagine a world without thinking about monetary values altogether. And there are certain people within the degrowth movement, yes, like myself, who believe actually that we cannot have an equitable and sustainable world without dispensing with money. And first off, yes, it can happen at least in the imagination. - That's fantastic. Thank you both so much. I'm going to hand over to Lloyd now, but that was brilliant. - That was part one of our Principle of Charity Conversation and join us next week for part two. But first, a word from our partners. The Ethics Centre is an independent not-for-profit that for over 30 years has advocated for a more ethical society. Through all our work, we bring people together, create space for difficult conversations and encourage all to live and act according to their values. Check out our website for free access to articles, podcasts and videos that unpack the complexities of everyday life at www.ethics.org.au. (upbeat music)