Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet

561 research papers in, the case for degrowth is still weak.

Sign up | Read more Future Perfect stories | What is Future Perfect? Kelsey Piper is a senior writer for Future Perfect. She writes about science, technology, and progress. You can read more of her work here and follow her on X. Kelsey Piper is a senior writer for Future Perfect. She writes about science, technology, and progress. You can read more of her work here and follow her on X.   Hey readers, Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever?    As I've written before, the answer is 1) no, not really, and 2) we can also solve climate change without that, and that will be better for everyone — especially those who are already poor — so we should do that instead.   But this idea has stuck around in the form of the "degrowth" movement, which argues that "economic growth" as an objective inevitably leads to environmental destruction and that we should focus away from economic growth and toward ways to improve quality of life without it.   Degrowth has always been a bit of a moving target. Even mainstream economists will agree that GDP alone doesn't measure whether a life is meaningful and fulfilling, but they will also point out that as countries get richer, they also get healthier and happier. Is degrowth just the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or is it the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability?    I think a lot of people find something appealing about the rhetoric of degrowthism: anti-consumerism, a simpler life, local food, etc. But widespread adoption of all of those things would do approximately nothing about climate change or the other environmental issues the movement cares so much about.    And while degrowth positions itself as a policy platform, it's political poison. As soon as you start getting into details, it's hard to come up with anything that polls worse than a steadily shrinking economy and the end of the conveniences of modern life. That makes it a policy agenda without any proposals about how it would become a law, an agenda that would sink any politician who attached themselves to it. (Not that you're likely to find one.)    All of this combines to make the degrowth literature — which has by this point become an enormous body of work — frustrating. Degrowthers understandably expect people who want to criticize their movement to engage with its literature. One of the most frequent responses to criticism is that the critics have engaged with only a tiny fraction of the degrowth literature out there. That's true, but at the same time, no one can seriously engage with hundreds of papers.   But the fact that there's so much written about degrowth doesn't mean there's good answers hidden somewhere in the pile of papers. I've increasingly gotten the sense that the movement's contributors are effectively in an academic echo chamber, publishing papers that only they read and that don't address any of the reservations of their critics.    A new fiercely critical review of the degrowth literature, published in the journal Ecological Economics, sums up everything that's gone wrong. But it also offers the degrowth community the serious critical engagement it will need if it wants to move from idle speculation to a workable policy program. Michel Porro/Getty Images What's wrong with the degrowth literature?   The authors analyzed 561 papers about degrowth in an effort to describe where the field is at today. What they uncovered was profoundly discouraging.    Their major takeaways: Of the 561 studies, "the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis … most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies … Data analysis is often superficial and incomplete … studies tend to not satisfy accepted standards for good research."   It's rare to see a critique this stark of an entire field's academic literature in a respected journal that is itself within that field (Ecological Economics publishes papers on degrowth). And, to be clear, these are some extremely damning critiques. They paint a picture of a field that's unserious about the actual standards of academic work, one flooded with papers (many of them in reasonably respected journals) but conducted totally without reference to everything we actually know about how climate, development, and policy work.  Reading this review, one comes away with the impression that the degrowth literature is fundamentally unserious. The authors of the review say, "[O]ne is inclined to infer that degrowth cannot (yet) be considered as a significant field of academic research."   The review describes paper after paper with meaninglessly tiny sample sizes: sociological interviews with 10 volunteers who make handicrafts for a charity in a town in Germany, 12 interviews with residents of a town near Barcelona about tourism, eight interviews with environmental justice leaders in Croatia. Even a healthy field will have the occasional paper with a tiny sample size or that's methodologically shaky, but the popularity of these tiny sample-size qualitative interview-based studies is typical of a field in its infancy that hasn't yet nailed down its core questions or methodologies.    Degrowthism isn't ready All of this is a significant problem. If a policy proposal is intended to solve a problem like climate change, it needs to be put into effect worldwide within the next decade or two. That's not the stage of policy maturity where you publish lots of interviews with volunteers at NGOs; it's the stage of policy maturity where you are expected to have (and where the mainstream climate policy literature does have) specific by-country emissions targets, breakdowns of possible routes for that country's energy demand to be met while those emissions targets are met, and analyses of the trajectory so far.    You might expect that the field would have these struggles as it was new but would have higher-quality research as it matured. That does not appear to be the case with degrowthism, which has its origins as far back as the 1972 report "The Limits to Growth" by the Club of Rome. As the review authors concluded: "There is also no indication that things are improving with time." Recent work is just as far from meeting scientific standards as older work.    None of this surprised me as someone who has tried in the past to wade through the degrowth literature for my reporting. But I am glad the review was comprehensively written up and published in a journal that people who believe in degrowth actually read.    If you think that our world needs degrowth, then the horrendously poor quality of the degrowth literature isn't just annoying, it's a serious emergency. The more important a problem is, the more important it is to do high-quality, comprehensive, well-justified work on it. If degrowth ideas have something to offer the world, it's all the more important that they adhere to normal standards about how to do research.   —Kelsey Piper, senior writer 📲 Questions? Comments? Tell us what you think! If there is a topic you want us to explain or a story you're curious to learn more about, fill out this form or email us at futureperfect@vox.com.   Why Harris and Trump don't want a Japanese company to buy US Steel Bloomberg via Getty Images US Steel — the iconic American company — is for sale. But politicians don't want Japan's Nippon Steel to buy it. Some of the concern might be symbolism about the unstoppable economic rise of Japan. But the bigger reason politicians are lining up against the deal is the United Steelworkers union (USW), which includes most of US Steel's workforce among its 60,000 steelmaking members and strongly opposes it. Senior correspondent Dylan Matthews explains why the union has concerns.   More on this topic from Vox: Labor unions aren't "booming." They're dying. Can we grow the economy without making more useless junk? Rich countries are flooding the developing world with their used gas cars The perfect escape from our online world Alex Segre/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Today, the damage of social media is being scrutinized as never before. In June, the US Surgeon General introduced a campaign that would put warning labels on social media apps, similar to what we've seen on tobacco and nicotine products for decades. But the most telling indicator may be a recent embrace of analog technologies like flip phones, vinyl records, and cassette players, writes journalist Zoë Bernard.   More on this topic from Vox: What the evidence really says about social media's impact on teens' mental health Poor countries are developing a new paradigm of mental health care. America is taking note. Your phone can tell when you're depressed Become a Vox Member   Support our journalism — become a Vox Member and you'll get exclusive access to the newsroom with members-only perks including newsletters, bonus podcasts and videos, and more. Join our community WHAT WE'RE THINKING ABOUT VCG via Getty Images It may seem silly to worry about 3D-printed guns in a country that has as many as 400 million firearms that were made the old-fashioned way. But as an unnerving story in the New York Times this week argues, one popular brand of homemade gun is worsening conflict and crime around the world. With the FGC-9, "anyone with a commercial 3D printer, hundreds of dollars in materials, some metalworking skills, and plenty of patience could become a gun owner." This is especially bad news for countries with tough regulations on commercial guns. But its popularity is also a sign of the way technology can increasingly empower the individual — in this case, with lethal power. —Bryan Walsh, editorial director   "Can algae be surprised? Apparently, yes; and they don't like it." When Michael Levin tweets something like, you better believe I click. He's the biologist I interviewed for my story on panpsychism — the theory that absolutely everything is conscious. Levin is a panpsychist, and he's on a scientific quest to explore how even the simplest organisms may exhibit minimal forms of consciousness. In this new paper, he and his coauthors show that algae can remember, be surprised by random events that don't meet expected patterns, and try to minimize uncertainty. —Sigal Samuel, senior reporter   The perception that companies like Neuralink are doing something brand new has always irked me. Controlling computers with the mind isn't new: Neuroscientists have demonstrated this in both humans and animals for decades (and can someone please tell Elon Musk that visualizing the electrical activity of a neuron is soooo 1868?). In this vein, Erik Hoel published a great post this week exploring whether Neuralink's grand vision of merging humans and machines is grounded in neuroscientific reality. Spoiler alert: Our meat brains may simply be too slow to enter a symbiotic relationship with AI. But if we can create assistive technology that helps people speak, move, and live independently when they otherwise could not, it's probably still worth it. —Celia Ford, Future Perfect fellow   As the designated politics sicko of the team, I am still running on adrenaline from Tuesday night's debate. Of all the takes flying on social media the morning after, I found this one from my former colleague Matt Yglesias particularly keen. Should we really be punishing people, even politicians, for changing their views when presented with new information? It brought to mind one of my favorite podcast episodes, from British political scientist David Runciman's series History of Ideas, on Judith Shklar, cruelty and hypocrisy. What has stuck with me is the argument that perhaps we should be more tolerant of hypocrisy, of flip-flopping, to borrow from the debate. People should be allowed to change their minds. —Dylan Scott, senior correspondent and editor Are you enjoying the Future Perfect newsletter? Forward it to a friend; they can sign up for it right here. Want more Future Perfect in your inbox? We also have two other free newsletters you can subscribe to. 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