When discussing the growth issue, especially from the perspective of degrowth, one argument comes up regularly. This argument can be termed “infinite happiness” and it goes something like this: economic growth might be restrained or needs to be restrained for various reasons but surely no one wants to put an end to growth in creativity, quality of life, and happiness. This is then usually followed by the demand to provide a new indicator for societal well-being, going beyond GDP and including all sorts of hard-to-be-tangibles.… Read more
Degrowth capitalism — Oxymoron or blind spot?
In the persistent controversy over the necessity and possibility of ongoing economic growth for ecological sustainability and societal well-being, growth critics gather around Serge Latouche’s décroissance — degrowth. Being sort of a degrowth economist myself, I started to wonder about something you might wish to call “degrowth capitalism”. Having my disciplinary background in management science, it always appeared to me as a strange blind spot in the degrowth debate. The level of the firm is all too easily neglected, with the minor exceptions of social entrepreneurship.… Read more
Corporate Degrowth
In a recent blog entry, Saamah Abdallah commented on some remarks made by Duncan Green on the Oxfam blogs, as regards degrowth policy. Duncan’s original post was critical on the practical conclusions of a workshop on degrowth in London earlier this year. Myself, I was giving a talk there on “Degrowth and the Firm” and tried to give some empirical substantiations as what a degrowth business model might look like.
Saamah gives three direct policy implications for degrowth:
- Reduction of working hours.
Green Growth?
I was just reading an article in the newly established Ecological Economics Review on economic growth, written by Peter A. Victor. In this article, Victor is revisiting Kenneth Boulding‘s remarks on the economy of the coming spaceship Earth, focusing on economic growth and environmental impact.
He defines the concept of green growth as an economic state in which the rate of reduction of environmental impact per unit GDP exceeds the rate of increase in GDP.… Read more