Fiche de lecture - "La décroissance", Serge Latouche, 2019

    The present paper aims to address a review and a discussion on the book La Décroissance, (Degrowth), written by the economist Serge Latouche in 2019. Professor of economics at the University of Paris-Saclay, Serge Latouche is one of the main French theorists of degrowth in economics. Published by Presses Universitaires de France, this 125 pages is a good introduction and conceptualization of the concept of degrowth in economics. Latouche study this concept of degrowth, since the 1970s, but a publication in 2019 was a response to a growing need to discuss the controversies surrounding degrowth in a context where it appeared urgent to take more alternatives into account, with the intensification of climate crisis. This is thus a brilliant synthesis on a controversial and misunderstood subject, linking economics theories with political and philosophical aspects- this is why this paper will draw some parallels between several disciplines and will not rely only on economics. Latouche methodically deconstructs an ideology- the growth- that is nothing but a mortage on the future and reminds us that degrowth project is not a return to the Stone Age.

Our first part will focus on an overview of the books’s thesis and arguments, starting with an introduction of the meaning of the concepts and its semantics, followed by the author’s critics of the current globalized economy and why we should get out of the consumption society; and then the analysis of the degrowth’s objectives. Secondly, we will engage with a book discussion and more generally on degrowth, enlivened by proposals of case studies and urban policies that can be put in place regarding degrowth - a part that will be all along complemented with my personal point of view and opinions on degrowth.

First and foremost, it is crucial to address the concept « degrowth » in itself and its sense, a concept that cannot be defined using one sentence and whose very term is ambiguous and misunderstandings around the its meaning are numerous. Degrowth undoubtedly evokes a reduction in the torrent of growth, but it is not a question of returning to the Stone Age, but to a material standard of living comparable with the reproduction of ecosystems. It would then be another civilisation project, a rallying point for all those who aspire to the construction of a real alternative to the dominant economic model of Western modernity: in this way, it is not a new economic project or another economy, neither an alternative economic paradigm that challenges neoclassical othodoxy in the same way that Keynesianism did, but more a societal project.Its very early use in socio-economical debates hides its long historical attachment: if the use of the term in ecological debates is recent, ideas conveyed are not new. The economist John Stuart Mill, in 1840's, already asserted that "The growth of wealth is not unlimited » in its Treatise Principles of Political Economy, 1848.The first rapport Meadows (Club de Rome), The Limits to the growth in 1972, served as a real trigger for the degrowth movement as it constitutes the first substantial study highlighting the dangers of the consumer society. Then, the word degrowth appeared under André Gorz’s article :Is the global equilibrium, of which the non-growth- event the degrowth- of material production is a condition, comptable with the survival of the system? (in le Nouvel Observateur, no 397 du 19 juin 1972). It is not initially a concept but rather a provocative political slogan whose purpose is above all to make people think in order to recover a sense of limits. Since the triumph of ultra-liberalism and Thatcher's famous TNA (There is no alternative) in the 1970s, a whole radical movement (not unified) proposing a real alternative to the consumer society and to the dogma of growth was responding to a historical need to criticize a globalized market capitalism. Thus, we find a double filiation of ideas linked to degrowth: the criticism of technology and development on the one hand (the thermo- industrial society having been criticized from the beginning, notably by the human sciences which found the idea of homo eoconomicus reductive: the first socialisms of the end of the 19th century as well as the anarchist tradition, and then the important societal questioning since the 1960s); the environmental awareness on the other, which showed that not only is the growth society undesirable, but it is also unsustainable (in the 1970s, the ecological question within economics having been theorized by the Romanian Nicholas Georgesco-Roegen and popularized at the same time by the Club of Rome Limits to Growth).

It would be absurd to take the sense of the word literally (as most of the controversies to delegitimize the project are based on): in the literal sense, degrowth would be the inversion of the growth curve of the GDP which measures the wealth produced by a country, i.e. a recession, a negative growth. However, degrowth movement is opposing this kind of undergone declining (for instance the recession after the 30 Glorious, after the European crisis of 2008 or during the containment linked to Covid-19), as it would be absurd to decrease for decreasing as it is already absurd to grow for growing, so the word should not be taken literally. Indeed, there is a difference between a undergone decline and a chosen degrowth, knowing that there is nothing worst but a growth society without growth (which implies the impossibility of breaking with deficit spiral, debt repayment, increasing unemployment, income gap, abdomen of social health educational and cultural programs etc).

Concerning the semantics of the word- something that is interesting to address since the essay is written is an other language than the original book- translation outside the Latin geographical sphere is a difficult task. Indeed, it is impossible to translate 'degrowth' literally into non-Latin languages because the connotations are difficult to transpose outside the cultural sensitivities that are specific to it, due to divergent cultural imaginations. In English, for example, the mental domination of the economist in the Anglo-Saxon cultural area makes it easier to think about collapse than to get out of the imaginary of growth: degrowth has been imposed in the face of decreasing, declining, ungrowth, but the underlying imaginary is missing.There is thus an irreparable ambiguity in the word itself.

Besides, what are the Latouche’s arguments concerning the need to break with the consumer society? He starts the chapter by asserting that « Man emerged from the cosmos and can only survive in symbiosis with the terrestrial ecosystem which is his matrix, so he must necessarily metabolize with his environment ». According to him, our occidental modernist society is the only culture that has made the abstract growth of capital -and not the biological growth- its religion. It is true that we live in a world where the economic growth and wealth of each country is identified with the statistical quantity that measures it, namely GDP and GDP/head as an index of well-being. This "fiction" is, according to the author, illusory, since it means that all production and expenditure is added to the value added, even if they are harmful to the environment or are expenditure linked to the repair of negative externalities, i.e. it does not include collateral damage. He then denounces the counter-productivity of growth. We will note that Latouche is very critical toward the concept of sustainable development, an oxymoron that hides the real- meaning of a sustainable growth, which is in reality a question of making accept the damage of growth while giving a good ecological conscience. Latouche reminds us that sustainable development have been launched as a new laundry detergent brand at the 1992 Rio Conference by Maurice Strong, a canadian oil billionaire and UNEP Secretory (Besides, the current biggest promoter of sustainable development is Stephan Schmidheiny, a Swiss billionaire that found the world Business Council for Sustainable Development, a grouping of the world’s biggest polluters).

A growth society is thus not desirable as it generates a rise in inequality and injustice (he quotes the Oxfam report as well as the Piketty’s thesis of the injustice development in the core itself of a capitalist system), it creates a largely illusory well-being and constitutes and « anti-society » where human links are based upon competition which in turn condemns to seek productivity gains at all costs. The economic society of growth does not realize the proclaimed objective of modernity that justifies it, namely the greatest happiness to the greatest number: this promise of abundance and material well-being is betrayed if we look at the reality, the current social and environmental damage and the deterioration of the psychological health of Westerners. He cites several economist theories in order to justify his arguments, such as the Daniel Kahneman’s Treadmill effect (This theory states that increase in income implies a continuous search for new consumption to maintain the same level of satisfaction) or the Richard Easterlin’s statistics on money and happiness (Easterlin proved, with a lot of statistics and sophisticated equations, that money does not make people happy (Does econmic growth improve the human lot? report) , and also the end of the famous controversy trickle-down effect which is, since the 1980s, mutating into a trickle- up movement. The growth society, as the capitalist economy of production’s outcome, is relying on an economic unlimitedness (of production, consumption, and use of natural ressources) which more fundamentally hides the congenital excessiveness of modernity. A large overview of the modern society excess and immoderation at the end of the chapter brings the author calling our world : L’absurdistan.

Then, what are the objectives of degrowth project ? For him, once liberated from productivist totalitarianism and the economic imperialism, it is a question of reopening the human adventure to the plurality of destinies (page 56): it is not a question of an alternative path, of a unique alternative societal model that should be applied but a matrix of alternative possibilities. This is why degrowth is not a turnkey model or a pre-designed system. Degrowth is based above all on the virtuous circle of sobriety of the 8Rs: re-evaluate, re- conceptualize, restructure, relocate, redistribute, reduce, reuse, recycle; a revolutionary project as it implies a radical break with the current socio-economic system in place for a society of frugal abondance. The author insists on pluralism: degrowth is not a political project in itself because it does not necessarily go through the classical entity that is the political party, but rather it is « a system of new values, opening a space of cultural diversity and alternatives to productivism” (page 68) . The proponents of degrowth advocate a re- foundation of politics in order to favor small-scale "polities", on a local scale, which are constituted by society itself (and not by an imposed external authority), and which are confederated among themselves. Indeed, according to the famous philosopher André Gorz, It is this capacity for local self-organisation that will allow each community or region to control its own socio-economic future and to invent its own originality, while remaining open to the world (page 88).

We could resume Latouche’s arguments on degrowth project within five factors: the reduction of global productivity due to the abandonment of the thermo-industrial model and the rejection of polluting techniques; the relocation of activities and stopping exploitation in South; the creation of new jobs in new sectors; the massive reduction of time spent on productive activities; the changement of lifestyles and suppression of useless needs.

Finally, we could quote Latouche concerning the realization of the transition : The realization of the project of a society of frugal abundance requires above all a mental revolution, not the seizure of political power. The author quotes Cornelius Castoriadis, theorist of the institution of the imaginary in society: he explains the way in which the process of economicisation of imaginaries coupled with the commodification of the world with the development of the growth society has led to a process of conversion of mentalities aimed at instituting the imaginary of progress. Today, it is a question of employing a reverse process, of detoxification, in order to put the economy back in its place as a simple means to human life and not as an ultimate end. It is important to point out that the author cites a lot of thinkers of different disciplines and periods: from the socialists-marxists and anarchists of the end of the XIXè (Marx, Engels, Thoreau, Bakounine, Kropotkine, Proudhon, John Stuart Mill) to the philosophers, economists and sociologues critiques of consumer society after the Second World War (André Gorz, Benard Charbonneau, Jacques Ellul, François Partant, Ivan Illich, Murray Bookchin), passing through poeters and novelists who sometimes decipher society more relevantly than theorists (Tagore, Tolstoï).

The book ends with a hopeful conclusion, more philosophical than economic, on the need to "re-enchant the world and our relationship with nature", to rediscover a spirituality (which can be quite secular) that connects us to our capacity to wonder and feel the interdependencies that exist within the living world.

As we can see, although Latouche deconstructs liberal economic theory and uses numerous economic arguments to support his thesis, his book is anchored more in a reflection of political ecology and philosophy, insofar as the project of degrowth goes far beyond the limits of economic theories. This book encourages us to differentiate between the natural organism and the economic organism, and above all to reintegrate the economic organism into its natural organism. It is interesting to note that, according the economist Gerogescu-Ruegen, by adopting the model of Newtonian mechanics, the economy we know ignores entropy, i.e. the irreversibility of time and the non-reversibility of energy and matter transformations, in other words, the real economic process, unlike the theoretical model, is not a reversible mechanical process but takes place in a biosphere that operates in a time bound manner. This amounts to underlining the untouchable impossibility of infinite growth in a finite world.

We could start our discussion with this quote from the American economist Kenneth Boulding : Anyone who thinks that infinite exponential growth is possible in a finite world is either a madman or an economist (US, 1973, 93th Congress on energy reorganization). The whole issue of degrowth can be summed up in this question: in the age of the climate, ecological and energy challenges we are facing, should we, or even can we continue to want our economies to grow? I believe that this question is still largely taboo because the prospect of the end of growth is so frightening. Growth will be green, sustainable, durable, but it will be there, it is obvious... However, IPCC report (1) revealed that, with the current already-implemented policies concerning GHG emissions, we are on our way to reach 3 or 3.5° in 2050. The « challenging » changes that the IPCC scenario is talking about, in order to hope a climate change above 2°c, is not even challenging but revolutionary concerning our society changes. It is basically saying that no one will never live the same kind of life they are currently living. Most of the controversies around degrowth comes back to the difficulty of abstracting from the mental framework of the growth society and the idea of reconverting the economy. A universal model of development is imposed where the only way to achieve prosperity is to boost the economic pedometer - the measurement of prices due to the exchange of market goods in an economy - at the expense of the social and ecological value that is not measured. But GDP, as a pedometer of monetary transactions, to quantify wealth, seems like that it is similar as deriving our well-being from the number of steps we take during the day. In that vein, we saw in Ecology and Politics (Pierre Charbonnier) that the growth paradigm is far from being neutral or an incontestable dictum; and responded to a post-second-world-war era where the investments were seen as factor of stability to respond the need to stabilize the international political system (2). The website of the economist Timothée Parrique (3), is really interesting for the analysis of degrowth debates and the relationship between economic growth and environmental degradations. For him, climate change is an economic issue. Any economy has an optimal size in terms of performance - as the capacity of an economy to transform resources into welfare- but too big economies are counter-productive. He proves the evidence of non-improvement in human well-being in parallel with national income increase beyond a certain thresholds by reminding us the law of diminishing marginal returns. This is the Easterlin paradox (4) in economics: above a certain threshold of GDP/ capita (stock), economic growth no longer improves welfare, education and health. This is thus absurd when we know that there are many situations in which economic growth does not create jobs, increases economic inequality, and increases poverty: it is not mechanical and automatic as neoliberal economic theories sustain.

Concerning the pressure upon natural ressources, we could object degrowth thinkers that, according to the economists Robert Solow and Joseph E. Stiglitz (awarded the "Nobel Prize" for economics in 1987 and 2001), capital and labour can substitute for natural resources in production, ensuring the sustainability of growth (5): the important thing would be human capital, the capacity of people to invent new solutions. I believe that this argument is largely outdated today, if we look at the long-standing and accelerating damage caused by climate change and the impact of economic theories evolving outside our planetary ecosystem. In this context, we can recall Jevons's paradox (6) in energy economics, which shows that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, the total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases.

However, radical anti-productivists remains rather vague on the modalities of an ecological break: it "does not say who goes without and who disappears", explains OFCE director Xavier Timbaud (7). The blind spot of degrowth thinkers is indeed to explain how to get back to these local and rural organized societies but on a global scale, for 10 billion people. In that vein, it is not evident that degrowth is necessarily sustainable, or convivial, and democratic, but it can be authoritarian or even dictatorial. This is why, in order to avoid the totalitarian application of their programme, the "anti-growths" are thinking of a change "from below", which would come from all the simple consumer citizen, informed and therefore aware of the issues at stake. In the very interesting documentary « Sacré Croissance! »(8)- which alternates between concrete experiences of people around the world who think that it is time to « change our software », with economic experts - the economist Thomas Greco thinks that we must reconstruct the whole economic system from the bottom, communities by communities. It permits me to transition toward propositions of case studies and urban initiatives concerning degrowth. From an urban point of view, as we have seen, degrowth proposes reinventing territorial autonomy and solidarity and reinventing a local democracy adapted to the historical situation. In that vein, the documentary is really interesting as it shows initiatives on the ground, alternative to growth model, in the fields of food production (urban agriculture), energy (eco- municipalities), and exchange of goods and services (local currencies and banks), in the North as well as in the South for each. Also, it is necessary to evoke Rob Hopkins' Transition Towns (9) international movement as a very concrete case of degrowth urban politics- providing with concrete ideas and projects to create, from the local scale, cities and neighborhoods that function on resilience and sobriety, while forming a network between them. Concerning GDP calculations, the book Mismeasuring Our lives: why GDP doesn’t add up, economist Joseph Stihlitz proposes alternative indicators of wealth, stating that GDP is far from being a reliable indicator of economic and social progress : he introduces a « green GDP » . Two case studies are really interesting in that vein : New Zealand has recently stopped focusing its public policy on GDP but in welfare, which showed that on a national scale, it is possible to change the approach- and the case of Gross National Happiness in Bouthan, an Asian country that measure the level of happiness of its people instead of the GNP, based on 4 fundamental principles: the responsible economic growth and development ; the conservation and promotion of Bhutanese culture, the safeguarding the environment and promoting sustainable development and the responsible good governance (10).

Finally, while the theory of degrowth raises real questions about the sustainability of the current system, it is often described as utopian because it requires cultural changes and national solidarity that seem impossible to put in place. However, economist Jason Hickel in Less Is More: How degrowth will save the world (2020), demonstrates, through large- scale opinion polls, that post-growth ideas already enjoy very strong support as a large large majority of respondents are in favor of prioritizing ecological stability and human well-being over GDP growth; in other words, an economy organized around well-being, greater solidarity and justice rather than capital accumulation. The often criticized radically of degrowth is besides maybe its strength: etymologically, radical come from the Latin radicalis, which refers to the root. To be radical is to get to the root of the problem. Degrowth is indeed radical because it not only heals the violence of our economic system - making it carbon-neutral - but also - and above all - identifies the mechanisms at the origin of the social-ecological crisis and start inventing alternatives to solve them.

To conclude, I believe that the debate around degrowth brings to light certain contradictions, certain dilemmas, thus it worth address it. Also, it allows to overcome the limitations of thinking in silos, linking several disciplines, economics ah well as philosophy and politics. If we put on glasses of national accounting (GDP), degrowth appears to be a deterioration (of life standards, wealth etc) but if we change our glasses, with social and ecological indicators, degrowth is perhaps an improvement of the economic system, which aims to increase the social and ecological efficiency of wellbeing— it all depends on the axiological prism and the scale of values we adopt. For sure, it can be accused of being utopian and not really clear on its application at a large-scale, but at the same time radicalism is capable of addressing the reality of ecological crisis and the fact that the problem is not only GHGs but also the water cycle, the biodiversity loss, the air pollution, etc i.e. the 9 planetary limits (cf Donought economy (11)) - something that the zero- emissions-net and carbon-free policies our economies are implementing is not capable of doing so.

(1) The Sixth Assessment of the IPCC, published in April 2022, can be found there: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

(2)Avery interesting article about the historical patterns at stake with the growth paradigm : In « The growth paradigm: History, hegemony, and the contested making of economic growthmanship » (2015), Mathias Schmelzer shows that even though asserting universal validity, the myth growth paradigm was invented in very specific social spatial historical contexts for limited interests and shaped by historical situation in a « particular cast of mind » on the « perception of which models the reality »

(3)https://timotheeparrique.com/, Author of « Decoupling debunked - Evidence and arguments against green growth », a study edited by the European Environment Bureau in July 2019

(4)It argues that initially, high growth rates bring immediate benefits, but after a certain threshold of GDP/capita, economic growth no longer improves welfare, health.

(5) Comment Robert Solow et Joseph Stiglitz ont introduit l’environnement dans la théorie standard, LE 01/03/2013, Hors-série Pratique n°061 Alternatives Économiques, https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/robert-solow-joseph- stiglitz-ont-introduit-lenvironnement-th/00066858

(6) Le Paradoxe de Jevons: fiche concept, Partageons l’éco, https://partageonsleco.com/2020/11/30/le-paradoxe-de- jevons/

(7) Entretien Xavier Timbeau: Le récit de la décroissance ne dit pas qui se prive et qui disparait, Alternatives Économiques, 19/09/2020, https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/xavier-timbeau-recit-de-decroissance-ne-dit-se- prive-q/00093855

(8) Marie-Monique Robin, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZGOdM7UKA

(9) The network: https://transitionnetwork.org/ and his Manuel de Transition: de la dépendance au pétrole à la résilience locale.

(10) Very good focus on this in the documentary Sacré Croissance! Marie-Monique Robin, 2014, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDZGOdM7UKA

(11) The Donought Economy, diagram developed by University of Oxford economist Kate Raworth, is a visual framework addressing the concept of planetary boundaries to asses an economy's performances. In turn, the planetary limits are the thresholds humanity should not exceed in order to avoid abrupt and unpredictable changes in the planetary environment. The 9 are enabling and regulating the stability of the biosphere: climate change, disruption of the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, land-use change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, global water use, increasing aerosols in atmosphere, chemical pollution and stratospheric ozone depletion.