Commentary
Last December, the journal Nature published an article bearing the title, “Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help.” The subtitle proclaims, “Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.”
As the article itself makes plain, these folks aren’t advocating slower growth; what they call “degrowth” is negative growth, aka economic contraction. For those of you who find the advocacy of economic contraction somewhat misanthropic, you’re right, of course, but in fairness to the authors of this article, they aren’t calling for the whole world to be made poorer. The authors make it clear that they’re only talking about negative growth for today’s prosperous countries. They’re in favor of poorer countries growing more prosperous while the richer countries’ economies shrink, thereby closing the current economic gap between rich and poor. This is a vision of socialism on a global scale….