Video: Could degrowth save the world?

An interesting overview of degrowth from the BBC News channel that I wanted to draw your attention to. Unusually, producer Alvaro Alvarez has gone looking for practical examples of people attempting to live out degrowth principles, alongside academics and theorists. One is rural and one is urban, a co-housing project in Spain with shared spaces and a library of things.

Being the BBC, it’s also forbidden from picking a side and features some sceptics too. Some economists pop up at the end to fly the flag for economic growth, but they get less attention than you might think.

There is an important bit of the story missing, in my view. I’ll let you watch the report first and then I’ll mention what it is.

Here’s the bit that the report left out, and that I think is important if degrowth is going to get anywhere.

Debates tend to get pushed into a binary for or against, growth or degrowth. This is too simplistic, and why I don’t generally use the term degrowth myself. To me, growth is best understood as a process with a natural conclusion. Living things grow until they reach maturity. Once something is fully grown, we expect growth to slow and cease, and that’s entirely normal.

Thinking about economic growth in this way means that we can celebrate it and what it can achieve – something degrowthers are often reluctant to do. It also means we can celebrate the end of growth – something mainstream economists can’t do – because it marks maturity, not stagnation. We can put growth in its proper place. It’s something we do until we don’t need it any more, at which point it would be unhealthy to continue.

This is the argument in my book with Katherine Trebeck, The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown-Up Economy. We describe what maturity looks like in an economy, as it grows enough wealth, infrastructure and materials to provide a good living for all its citizens. We also describe what progress and innovation look like beyond that point, as it unfolds through quality rather than quantity. The book generates some different language and metaphors for thinking about growth and degrowth, because in my opinion the movement is rather hamstrung by the name it has ended up with. It’s an academic book and didn’t get a huge amount of attention, but the central thesis still feels to me like a missing piece of the puzzle.

• More on arrival