The achievement of a degrowth future requires system change not green new deals

When I was just coming into adulthood (1972), the – Club of Rome – published its famous – The Limits to Growth – which focused on the consequences of “exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources”. It was a very influential research document generally, but also very important in shaping the way I would think about the world. The critics were many and the fossil fuel industry lobbying powerful and while the ideas did move policy makers somewhat and motivated new movements or gave impetus to existing bodies, such as the – Zero population growth – organisation, the vital message was largely ignored. Even the more recent green-oriented activism has not seen fit to focus on population growth as the primary problem that has to be addressed, if all the other problems of excessive energy use are to be dealt with effectively. Marxists were also very critical of the Club of Rome report for reasons that always escaped me. They criticised the Club’s focus on overpopulation, claiming it distracted us from the real problem, which was the voracious logic of the Capitalism system of production and accumulation. I always thought those attacks were unhelpful and allowed the progressive (Left) response to climate change to be fractured and, hence, weakened.

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Shifts in societal attitudes towards well-being mean that a degrowth strategy does not necessarily have to be political suicide

At the end of World War 2, the Western nations were beset with paranoia about what the USSR might be planning. The West had essentially relied on the Soviet armed forces to defeat the Nazis through their efforts on the Eastern front, after Hitler had launched – Operation Barbarossa – which effectively ended the – Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact – signed in 1939 between Germany and the USSR. Following the War, the ‘spectre of Communism’ drove the Western political leaders to embrace social democracy and introduce policies that created the mass-consuming middle class in most countries, which was seen as a bulwark against the development of a revolutionary working class movement and any further spread of Communism. While the interests of capital hated the welfare state and the rise of trade unions, they saw these developments as a means to protect their hegemony in the new world and the uncertainty that the – Cold War – engendered. Mass consumption was akin to Marx’s claims about religion being the ‘opium of the people’ and it has been a dominant part of life in advanced nations in the Post War period. It is one of the reasons that people think a degrowth strategy can never be embraced by the political class because it would confront a population besotted with material accumulation and consumption. However, research from Japan suggests that a strategy designed to reduce material consumption will not “reduce individual happiness and collective wellbeing” (Source) and a decoupling between growth and human happiness is indeed possible, which means the political class, if they are courageous enough, can introduce policies that promote degrowth.

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The concept of degrowth remains underspecified – reform or revolution?

I have done quite a number of podcast interviews with various hosts over the last few weeks and the discussions often turn to issues relating to the environment and what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has to say about those issues. Inevitably, the discussions then meandered into debates about what is possible given that we humans are estimated to be using 1.7 times the regenerative capacity of our biosphere at present. At some unknown point, but sometime, that overuse will have to come to an end as the biosphere asserts its capacity constraints in one way or another. The question that seems to interest people now is whether the existing mode of production (Capitalism) is at all compatible with reducing that ratio. My answer is always the same. Those progressives who promote the notion of ‘green growth’, which is embedded in ‘green new deal’ proposals or their ilk, seem to think that we can make the shift away from fossil fuels and reduce the claim on the biosphere within a growth paradigm while retaining the Capitalist ownership relations. For me, a system where the logic is ever accumulation of capital via the creation and expropriation of surplus value and realisation of that value as profit, is incompatible with being able to live within the limits imposed by the biosphere. If we are to have any long-term future as a race, then we will have to embrace a degrowth strategy and radically alter the way we allocate resources and our patterns of production and consumption. In a sense, Marx’s long discredited notion of the – Tendency of the rate of profit to fall – as an intrinsic feature of Capitalism, which he believed would eventually bring the system asunder, is likely to be realised as the environmental constraints impinge on the accumulation system. Simply put, the logic of Capitalism requires growth and degrowth is the anathema of that logic.

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Delinking and degrowth

One of the issues that some on the Left raise when the topic ‘degrowth’ enters the conversation relates to the sense of elitism from the wealthy nations, which can now indulge in a bit of non-material aspiration amidst the large houses, two-or-three car garages, speed boats, lycra-clad journeys to coffee shops on $10,000 bicycles designed for racing but ridden around the corner … you get the message. The criticism is that such a bourgeois ‘movement’ has no correspondence with the needs and aspirations of citizens living in poorer nations with fundamental development challenges, not the least being food security and poverty. They thus reject the idea as another ‘woke’ issue. There is some truth in what they say but it is an inadequate stance given that the global economy is operating 1.7 times over regenerative capacity and urgent changes are required. That means we have to deal with the notion of dependency between ‘North’ and ‘South’, which takes us back to the colonial relations and beyond, as an integral part of the degrowth agenda. This is where the concept of ‘delinking’ comes in. Here are some preliminary notes on all that, which arise from research I am doing for my next book on these issues (probably coming out first quarter 2025).

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MMT and international trade – some further considerations in a degrowth context

One of the undercurrents at the recent UK MMT Conference in Leeds was the apparent unwillingness of MMT economists to acknowledge their mistake in dealing with international trade. In our new book – Modern Monetary Theory: Bill and Warren’s Excellent Adventure (published July 2024) – we devote a chapter to this issue. There are various strands to the criticisms we receive ranging from claims we are simply wrong at the most elemental level to others claiming trade has no part in the MMT framework. All miss the point and I am surprised people have tried to make a ‘career’ (or advance their egos) on this issue. As I have noted several times in the past, the issue is nuanced but the elementary facts are not. I am now working on a section for my new book (with Dr Louisa Connors) on ‘degrowth’ and system viability from an MMT perspective and so I am linking the trade aspects of MMT with this narrative to provide further clarification of how nuanced this area of discussion can be. Here is a little glimpse of that work.

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Degrowth and Japan – a shift in government strategy towards business failure?

I am briefly in the UK (arrived Tuesday and returning to Melbourne early Friday). We are officially launching our new book – Modern Monetary Theory: Bill and Warren’s Excellent Adventure – later this morning at the UK MMT Conference in Leeds, England. I am avoiding many of the sessions to reduce Covid risk, given the lecture theatres do not seem to have been refitted with modern ventilation. But from what I can see the Conference is well attended and going well. I should add that I had nothing to do with the organisation of the Conference but as usual I thank those who have put time to build an event that focuses on the work that I am part of. Anyway, a whirlwind trip this time. Today, though I reflect on the latest developments in Japan with respect to its ageing and shrinking population and how that impacts on business viability and skill shortages. All part of my research on degrowth strategies.

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Degrowth will require humans shovel less energy … into our bodies

I haven’t much time free today and with the federal government’s fiscal statement coming out tomorrow night and wage data and the labour force data coming out Wednesday and Thursday, respectively, it is going to be a full week. Given I am using all my time to finish the manuscript for my next book which has to be delivered to the publisher on June 1, I am writing very little here today. But there was some interesting data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last week that bears on my general theme of degrowth, in a roundabout sort of way. The data from the – National Health Survey 2022 – is very revealing and shows how far people will have to go to adopt degrowth behaviours at a personal level. And just so you know, while I wrote about health matters last week and will again today, I don’t intend to make it a regular habit on a Monday.

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From the archives – my early statements on the need for degrowth and the resistance they received from progressives

As part of a another current project, which I will have more to say about soon, I was trawling through early Internet archives of the Post Keynesian Thought (PKT) listserv archives and was reminded that I began my degrowth journey many years ago. Going back in time and coming across things that one has written is an interesting experience. In this case, I reflected on my changing narrative style, my naivety in places, and the continuity of my thinking over the course of my academic career. The following discussion is the product of my archival research for another project of the Post Keynesian Thought (PKT) discussion list archives. It has been an interesting exercise and brought back interactions, personalities and the like that I have forgotten about. Many on that list have since died (sadly). But what is established is that 30 or more years ago there was widespread resistance still within the progressive economics community to the idea that the destruction of the planet would require major systemic change. This resistance bears on the debates now between the dominant ‘green growth’ group who think capitalism aided by global financial capital can achieve the changes necessary to meet the climate challenge and the degrowth camp who want fundamental system and behavioural change. My writings in 1995 placed me firmly in the latter cohort.

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Moving to a sustainable system of food production within a degrowth paradigm

I read an interesting report in the last few days – The Economics of the Food System Transformation – published on January 29, 2024 by the – Food Systems Economics Commission (FSEC) – which “is a joint initiative that brings together 21 commissioners from 19 global institutions”. The topic is very relevant to research I am engaged in at present as part of my upcoming book release on Degrowth and Capitalism. It is also relevant to my lived experience which I will briefly touch on.

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Degrowth, food loss and food waste – Part 7

Last Monday, I wrote about the global need for us to abandon meat production for food, and, instead take up plant-based diets. Many people interpreted that argument as a personal attack on their dietary freedom, which indicates they fell into a fallacy of composition trap and declined to see the global issue. As part of my series on the Degrowth agenda, the other aspect about food which is important is that we have a propensity to produce too much food and distribute what we produce unfairly. I will deal with the distributional issues in another post. Today, I want to talk about the over-abundance of food in nations which means too much land, water and other resources is devoted to its production with commensurate negative environmental consequences. One manifestation of that phenomenon is food loss and food waste, which are different terms for the segment of the food supply chain where wastage occurs. If we are serious about dealing with the environmental disaster then we have to eliminate or dramatically reduce wastage. This will require significant investments in some nations to improve storage etc and a dramatic change in other nations in terms of attitudes to aesthetics, packaging, and more.

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Degrowth, food and agriculture – Part 6

This is Part 6 of a series on Deep Adaptation, Degrowth and MMT that I am steadily writing. I have previously written in this series that there will need to be a major change in the composition of output and the patterns of consumption if we are to progress towards a sustainable future. It will take more than cutting material production and consumption. We have to make some fundamental shifts in the way we think about materiality. The topic today is about consumption but a specific form – our food and diets. Some readers might know that there has been a long-standing debate across the globe on whether a vegetarian/vegan diet is a more sustainable path to follow than the traditional meat-eating diet. Any notion that the ‘meat’ industry is environmentally damaging is vehemently resisted by the big food corporations. Like anything that challenges the profit-seeking corporations there is a massive smokescreen of misinformation created to prevent any fundamental change. New research, however, makes it clear that we can achieve substantial reductions in carbon emissions by abandoning meat products in our diets and the gains are disproportionately biased towards the richest nations. I have long argued that I find a fundamental contradiction in those who espouse green credentials and advocate dramatic behavioural shifts to deal with climate change while a the same time eating meat products. The recent research supports that argument. So Greenies, give up the steaks and the chickens and get on your bikes and head to the greengrocer and start cooking plants.

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Degrowth, deep adaptation, and skills shortages – Part 5

This is Part 5 of an on-going series I am writing about the issues facing societies dealing with climate change and other elements which come together as a poly crisis. The series will unfold as I research and think about the topic more through my Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) lens. Today, I am concluding the analysis of the questions relating to the ageing society and the resulting skill shortages, that the mainstream narrative identifies as key ‘problems’ facing governments across the Western world. Like any issue, the way the ‘problem’ is constructed or framed influences the conclusions we come up with. Further, the tools use to operationalise that construction also influence the scope and quality of the analysis and the resulting conclusions. As I explained in Monday’s blog post – Degrowth, deep adaptation, and skills shortages – Part 4 (October 31, 2022) – the use of mainstream macroeconomics fails to deliver appropriate policy advice on these questions. But further, when we introduce multi-dimensional complexity – such as degrowth to the ageing society issue – the mainstream approach becomes catastrophic. MMT is a much better analytical framework for drilling down to see what the essential problem is and what are non-problems and thus creating the questions and answers that lead to sound policy. Today, I show why the existence of skills shortages really provides us with the space to pursue a degrowth strategy while not causing material standards of living to collapse. They are better seen as indicator of what is possible rather than a macro problem.

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Degrowth, deep adaptation, and skills shortages – Part 4

One of the ‘problems’ besetting the world at present, if the commentary in the mainstream press is anything to go by, is the existence of chronic skill shortages. Survey studies of the shifting demographics in Japan, for example, have produced ‘alarming’ results from a mainstream perspective. See for example, this OECD Report from 2021 – Changing skill needs in the Japanese labour market. I was at a meeting recently in Kyoto and it is clear that many firms in Japan are having trouble finding workers and many have even offered wage increases to lure workers to their companies. Further, many small and medium-size businesses are owned by persons who are over 70 years of age and that proportion is rising fast. The skill shortage scenario is tied in with the ageing society debate, where advanced nations are facing so-called demographic ‘time bombs’, with fewer people of working age left to produce for an increasing number of people who no longer work. The mainstream narrative paints these trends as major problems that have to be confronted by governments, and, typically, because of faulty understandings of the fiscal capacities of governments, propose deeply flawed solutions. I see these challenges in a very different light. Rather than construct the difficulties that firms might be facing attracting sufficient labour (the ‘skills shortages’ narrative), I prefer to see the situation as providing an indicator of the limits of economic activity or the space that nations have to implement a fairly immediate degrowth strategy. In the following two blog posts I will explain how this inversion of logic can become a crucial plank in the degrowth debate.

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Degrowth, Deep adaptation and MMT – Part 3

This is the third part in a on-going series that I am writing about Deep Adaptation, Degrowth and related concepts, all of which are designed to provide some sort of pathway beyond the current mess that the world is in with respect to climate, inequality, poverty, excessive consumption, and excessive population growth. Today, I consider how Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) fits into the transition agenda and discuss the labour market dislocation that will accompany the transition to degrowth.

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Deep adaptation, degrowth and MMT – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a series on Deep Adaptation and MMT that I am writing. The first part – Deep Adaptation – Part 1 (August 22, 2022) – introduced the concept. I have recently written about the coming together of a number of crises which I consider to be all linked and part of the end of normal business as we have known it. See – The global poly crisis is the culmination of the absurdity of neoliberalism (July 18, 2022). Thinking about the social aspects of that conjunction of crises, we understand that advancing material prosperity is still a goal that we should seek to achieve for millions of the globe’s citizens, who live in abject poverty with little food and housing security. But then, when we consider the ecological dimension we see immediately how the social goals have to be solved within a constrained envelope of overall material deprivation. The question then is how can we move forward towards achieving that duality. There are various propositions out there – Green New Deals, Green Growth, etc. I think they are all flawed and that proponents tend to become captured by the power relations that have created the current mess. That is where I think the concept of Deep Adaptation comes into play. Which brings me to a starting point in understanding where these institutionalised ‘green’ conservations have lost their way. Today, I am writing about growth and degrowth, because there are a lot of misunderstandings out there about this apparent conflict.

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Australian national accounts – government spending saves nation from zero growth

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Australian National Accounts: National Income, Expenditure and Product, September 2025 – today (December 3, 2025), which shows that the Australian economy slowed to 0.4 per cent (from 0.6 per cent) in the September-quarter 2025. At the current annual growth rate, unemployment is predicted to rise further, given current labour force and productivity growth (see below). Household consumption expenditure growth weakened while public and private investment was stronger. The 0.4 point overall government contribution was the difference between zero growth and the positive result recorded.

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Japan – where will the productivity growth come from? – Part 4

A few weeks ago I wrote this blog post – Japan – the challenges facing the new LDP leader – Part 2 (October 9, 2025) – documenting the viability of a fiscal expansion in Japan given the availability of idle labour resources, which are in short supply. I noted that the recent estimates from the Bank of Japan of the Labour Input gap were +0.47 per cent, which means the available labour force is working over their trend potential, and raise the question: How can output growth be possible with the labour capacity already well above potential? Which is what today’s discussion is about.

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Japan – the challenges facing the new LDP leader – Part 2

This is a second part of an as yet unknown total, where I investigate possible new policy agendas, which are designed to meet the challenges that Japan is facing in the immediate period and the years to come. This is also in the context of the elevation of Ms Takaichi to the LDP presidency and soon Prime Minister. She has suggested that her policy agenda will shift somewhat from the current government position, in the sense that she wants lower interest rates, while the majority of economists want higher, and she is advocating further fiscal expansion, while the mainstream want austerity. In the first part I examined the inflation issue in Japan, which suggests that the mainstream view that rates have to rise is misguided. Today, I am considering the scope for fiscal expansion.

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Kyoto Report 2025 – 1

This Tuesday report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for an extended period at Kyoto University in Japan but who over the years of working here has increasingly began to understand the language and local cultural traditions.

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Australia national accounts – stronger economic growth in June-quarter 2025

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Australian National Accounts: National Income, Expenditure and Product, March 2025 – today (September 3, 2025), which shows that the Australian economy grew by 0.6 per cent in the June-quarter 2025 (up from 0.2 per cent) and by 1.8 per cent (up from 1.3) over the 12 months. GDP per capita growth turned positive after several consecutive negative quarters. Household consumption expenditure growth strengthened and led the strong growth in domestic demand. Overall, a surprisingly robust result.

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