The “No-Growth” Prescription for Misery

Oct 17, 2018 Bjørn Lomborg

A growing number of academics are claiming that economic growth must stop because the planet is crossing environmental boundaries, and inequality between humans is increasing. They are wrong on both counts, and their agenda is a recipe for keeping poor people poor.

LONDON – From their ivory towers, nearly 240 academics have declared that economic growth is bad for Europe and the planet. In two months, they and global supporters of the “no-growth economy” have held conferences in Mexico City, Malmö, and Brussels.

Their efforts herald a return to an earlier, thoroughly debunked form of alarmist environmentalism that is detached from reality and disdainful of billions of the world’s people.

The campaigners claim we must stop economic growth because the planet is crossing environmental boundaries, and inequality between humans is increasing.

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Bjørn Lomborg

Writing for PS since 2005
181 Commentaries

Bjørn Lomborg, a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School, is Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. His books include The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World, and, most recently, Prioritizing Development. In 2004, he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people for his research on the smartest ways to help the world.

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Rodrigo Molledo Nov 13, 2018

Mr. Lomborg it does no matter what you "think" you know. Now, our capitalism system is based on the tesis of unlimited growth (on a finite planet with limited resources). The second pillar that sustains growth is a high an relatively cheap availability of primary energy. Since there is no history of growt without a significant increase in energy consumption and the IEA itself has already assumed in its reports a peak oil since 2005 with a replacement by energy sources with a very considerable rate of energy return much lower and therefore much less profitable. The divestment of energy companies in upstream is occurring on a scale never before seen (reports of companies). I wonder what his theory is about how and with what energy these countries are going to grow so that he starts to "worry" about environmental problems. By the way, do not forget that the environmental problems of these countries are ours since we are attributing a "contamination" to them when manufacturing products destined for developed countries, which means that they will have to be transported, making the energy-resources consumend ratio even more inefficient.

This article aims a reductio ad absurdum a solution to a problem that is not easy even for developed countries. Is this what is necessary to be a think tank? really?.
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Eric Kent Nov 10, 2018

This article is troubling to me, not because the author is unable to locate the root cause of our global environmental crises, but that he indeed DOES understand the root cause of our environmental crises…and chooses to instead regurgitate attractive statistics while omitting the other side of those statistics from his narrative. The only thing worse than a denialist is an apologist. The author cites that
“in 2015, the World Bank found that for the first time ever, less than 10% of the worlds population was living in extreme poverty. Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than one billion.”
This statement is factually correct; however, it only sounds nice until you look deeper into the issue at hand. This statistic is a favorite among neoliberal conservatives to cite because it frames capitalism as a global force for good, but all its really doing is rewording a negative outcome into a positive one.
If the above quote is factually correct, then why do I have particular qualms with it? Well, as we know Africa has 75 percent of the world’s poorest countries, with only slight poverty reduction over the past few decades. The number of African people living on less than $1.25 a day has declined a mere 8 percent since 1990. Not to mention that the $1.25 guideline put forward by the United Nations in its original Millennium Goals as the working threshold of global poverty is far from viable as a public-health measurement. Even with the recent 2015 evaluation of the poverty line to $1.90 a day, it is still not enough. Arguably a more accurate measure, termed by some researchers as “the ethical poverty line,” puts the dollar value much higher, revealing a different picture of reality. As articulated by Jason Hickel in late 2015:
“If we want to stick with a single international line, we might use the “ethical poverty line” devised by Peter Edward of Newcastle University. He calculates that in order to achieve normal human life expectancy of just over 70 years, people need roughly 2.7 to 3.9 times the existing poverty line. In the past, that was $5 a day. Using the World banks new calculations, its about $7.40 a day. As it happens, this number is close to the average of national poverty lines in the global south. So, what would happen if we were to measure global poverty at this more accurate level? We would see that about 4.2 billion people live in poverty today. That’s more than four times what the World Bank would have us believe, and more than 60% of humanity. And the number has risen sharply since 1980, with nearly 1 billion people added to the ranks of the poor over the past 35 years. The UN’s sustainable development goals, launched in September, are set to use the $1.90 line to measure poverty. Why do they persist with this implausibly low threshold? Because it’s the only one that shows any meaningful progress against poverty, and therefore lends a kind of happy justification to the existing economic order.”
If we consider the totality of the circumstances surrounding the poverty line, then the statement earlier from the article regarding the “the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than one billion between 1990 and today” is nothing short of right-wing propaganda. It is propaganda, not because it is false (its a factual statement); it is propaganda precisely because of what it leaves out, intentionally, to mislead the reader into believing capitalism is the necessary life-support system for the poor. Contrary to popular belief, the poor not having enough money isn’t the problem; In fact, global poverty can be ended with $175 billion; that’s less than 1% of the total annual income of all the richest countries in the world combined. Global poverty can be ended with money, but the root cause is the structural incentives and procedural dynamics of market economics. Simply put, theres no incentive to end poverty…its just not profitable. However, the article argues that the profit motive of capitalism, if left to its own devices, will be so productive and wealth-producing that it will lift the impoverished into greater standards of living by default.
This argument is valid because capitalism is indeed productive, but is this argument sound? In which direction is capitalism productive? Is it productive in regards to human needs, or is it productive for its own sake? The article mentions that
“economic growth has solved problems, not created them. The cleanest places are not the poorest countries, but the richer economies that have cleaned up their act. As societies become richer, individuals can afford to stop worrying about food and sanitation, and to start worrying about the environment.”
Again, this statement is a valid observation, but is nonetheless erroneous. The market economy is based on cyclical consumption and it really doesn’t matter what is being produced, how it is being produced, or why. If demand or production slows, so too does the movement of money, and when this happens, the economy contracts, systematically reducing the standard of living for many. Economically, this means capitalism is structurally oblivious to humanity’s existence on a finite planet. The system wants to produce, not conserve. In fact, if you think about it, you will discover an interesting paradox to market logic: the fact that capitalism is a scarcity-based economic system that actually seeks infinite consumption…In other words, it favors a threshold of goods scarcity to secure competitive profits, theorized as a model to properly manage scarcity, optimizing resource use and distribution. Yet, at the same time, the system demands more and more human dissatisfaction and “want” in order to function and grow…It rewards consumption, with no inherent incentive to conserve anything.
But the true knock-out punch to the implicit assumption that capitalism and economic growth is somehow a force for good against climate change is the notion of externalities. The definition of an externality with regard to economics is a “side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved, such as the pollination of surrounding crops by bees kept for honey.” According to a report published by the International Monetary Fund, fossil fuels cost $5.3 trillion annually in external damages, accounting for both “health and environmental costs associated with fossil-fuel use both on the side of the producer and the consumer, but not factored into its price.”
But here is the knock-out punch: a 2013 report on behalf of the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by the United Nations Environmental Program, found that NO MAJOR INDUSTRIES IN THE WORLD COULD BE CONSIDERED PROFITABLE FROM THE STANDPOINT OF EXTERNAL COSTS. In other words, if our core industries actually had to pay for fixing the external problems they create, they simply would not be profitable. The major profits gained are occurring without regard for the long-term destruction they are creating.
Now I could go on about how human activity is causing the 6th mass extinction event to the biosphere, how global fish stocks have been depleted upwards of 90 percent since 1950 due to pollution and overfishing, how over 80 percent of the worlds natural forests having been deforested and global tree loss is actually INCREASING by 51 percent in 2016 (the author slyly mentions “changing attitudes have meant rich countries are increasingly preserving forests and reforesting” but what this really means is the rich countries are merely exporting the damage to the global south, where the deforestation statistics are truly applicable), however waxing and waning about these rather depressing statistics is not the point of my response. In fact, I understand the point of the article, as its core message addresses the need to lift people out of poverty, and that if we stop developing – stop economic growth – then the poor will be stuck where they are perpetually.
The issue I take with this analysis, again completely valid, is that the author equivocates “economic growth” with “development” such that the only way to develop the standard of living for the poor is economic growth. I think this is a shaky premise, for the reasons I have just outlined, but also because I believe capitalist apologists need to stop conflating “wealth creation” with “technical development.” Yes, it is true that capital accumulates and concentrates, and this concentration of capital is able to allocate resources to develop technology. But…the concentration of capital is not the genesis of development and innovation, it merely provides space for a fertile breeding ground for innovation. True technical innovation is born of those who have training in STEM fields, but innovation may seem attributable to capitalism because we live in a society based on property, exchange, labor-for-income, and opportunistic monetary self-maximization. All things being equal, innovation is born of technical skills provided with a respectable standard of living, regardless of the social or economic system in place. Wealth creation/economic growth is simply not the same as technical innovation/infrastructural development.
I could go on, but I already realize this response is much too long as it is. I suppose I will conclude with highlighting a different way forward than the solution to provide greater market efficiently to the poor, and that is by providing greater technical efficiency to the poor…It is important to note that both of these concepts are mutually exclusive. Automation contradicts labor-for-income, open-access contradicts consumerism, open-source contradicts property, localization contradicts globalization, and networked digital feedback contradicts the monetary system itself (but this is an entirely different essay in and of itself).
In short, the system’s truncated presupposition of rational adults possessing “free will” in spite of the biopsychosocial pressures, coupled with the failure of policy makers and dishonesty of academia to understand poverty in its totality, retards the process of implementing the social imperatives necessary to align public values to empirical reality. Policies like Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the understanding that the necessities of life (food, water, clothing, shelter) are basic human rights everyone should be entitled to, regardless of class or income. Additionally, UBI addresses structural violence by recognizing adequate economic access to resources is a prerequisite for an individual to behave acceptably within the context of a monetary-based society. If we eliminate the financial pressure to survive, we eliminate crimes of deprivation. It cannot be emphasized enough that we currently possess the technological capability to easily provide everyone with the necessities of life coupled with a humane standard of living. There should be no need to compete or engage in criminal enterprise for an artificial scarcity to gain access to abundant authentic resources.
- Rodrigo Molledo Nov 13, 2018
  
  Congratulations! a comment considerably better than the article. Further, this comment should be the article.
  - Eric Kent Dec 13, 2018
    
    You should follow my blog on Medium.com under the name "The Spectre of Communism"
    
    Link: https://medium.com/@aaronsd1996
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Mark Alexander Oct 21, 2018

"The latter-day Malthusians are opposed to extending these tremendous benefits to more of the world because they believe that global warming will be so bad that it justifies stopping growth. This contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says, “for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers” like changes in population, age, income, and technology."

I don't know if I've missed something.

Climate change will be bad primarily for reasons other than its impact on the economy.

It doesn't make sense to damage the economy in order to save the economy from climate change. That is not the intention. We are attempting to save humanity from climate change.
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Chris Jones Oct 20, 2018

It worries me that a Socialist/Fascist group might use economic/environmental alarmisms based on bad climate modeling to impose a detrimental paradigm on the World's economies. Economic growth in capitalist frameworks has ushered in anti-poverty growth by ridding the world of slavery, poor sanitation, and poor food supplies while providing an illuminated world, faster travel, greater literacy, longer lifespans, and better conservation of our natural resources. Clean air, water, and other environmentalist/conservationist legislation has recognized and attempted remediation of problems along the way. Some issues will take decades or centuries to solve and some solutions such as wind energy and nuclear energy have resulted in other problems to be accounted for.
Urban planning has ushered in skyscaping buildings to handle concentrated human populations, but a future underground, undersea, or off planet is foreseeable in the not too distant future which may result in lower habitat energy costs in some areas.
The AGW lobby has somewhat succumbed to bubbly flatulence in regard to humankind's CO2 output while not accounting for natural processes in the ebbs and flows of greenhouse gases. Their suppression of the factors which have defined the historical record of climate change borders on professional negligence. Every moment brings new research describing the past climatical effects of periodical oceanic or atmospheric oscillations, solar cyclical changes, orbital cycles, and geological influences.
I note some proponents studying solar sunspot cycles predicting a possible little ice age commencing in late 2019/early 2020 and given the record cold in Denver (-8°C) or the record 40 cm of snow in North Dakota that may ruin 50% of the harvest, I worry they may be on to something. Throw a few large volcanic eruptions into the mix and our climate would be really screwed up.
I agree with Mr. Lomborg that we should not rush to judgment with possible Socialist/Fascist policies by reining in economic successes only to satisfy the whims of AGW proponents - especially if waiting a year changes the whole equation involving climate change.
- Michael Pettengill Oct 21, 2018
  
  Socialist/Fascist is when you pay more workers more money to build lots more productive capital assets.
  
  I guess capitalism when you stop paying workers to work and burn capital so you can consume without workers, making capital increasingly scarce so it's price inflates as rapidly as capital is destroyed?
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- Paul Friesen Oct 21, 2018
  
  Why does it seem to be regarded as a "conservative" virtue to run this vast, uncontrolled experiment on the planet we live on? Why is it "conservative" to extract all the oil this planet has stored away in the ground over the past billion years and burn it up in a few decades? Even if you doubt all the research that has been done suggesting that this is a very bad idea, would not the precautionary principle give you some pause?
  
  Sure, the earth itself has done things like this in the past. The end Permian extinction event may have been caused by volcanic eruptions, which may have ignited coal seams triggering a runaway greenhouse effect. The majority of the species present at that time went extinct. Not a good time to be around. This planet is not necessarily a very stable system, and we fool with it at our peril.
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John Doran Oct 19, 2018

I agree whole-heartedly with Bjorn Lomborg on the economics side: the Brit Empire was always infested with the diabolic Malthusian attitude that there are too many people.
In fact, all throughout history, more people has meant more prosperity.
Economist Julian Simon identified the reasons for this in his great book:
The Ultimate Resource 2.
The Ultimate resource is human ingenuity.

We live in a world of perverted science & perverted economics where the elites plot depopulation, on false grounds, & scientific & economic progress is held back by the 1%s & their fake news MSM.

Robert Zubrin, a PhD nuclear engineer with 9 patents to his name or pending, reveals some of the depopulation ploys & how safe & clean nuclear power is being held back by the demonising fake news MSM, by over-regulation & by bureaucracy.
His book is a grim read, but we live in a grim reality:
Merchants of Despair Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists,
and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism

The Malthusian & Darwinian roots of this present lunacy are clearly identified.

John Doran
- Michael Pettengill Oct 21, 2018
  
  The reason nuclear power is dead is tgat paying workers to build capital assests without destroying capital assets costs too much for conservatives, who want to force other people to live on nuclear waste sites so they get cheap electricity without paying anyone to work and while giving other people cancer.
  
  If conservatives really believed nuclear industry does not cause any harm, they would be bidding really high prices for nuclear waste sites to build housing for themselves and their children, and demanding they get to buy nuclear waste and 3% consumed fuel to build their homes with.
  
  Wall Street bankers would build their homes and monuments to capitalism with nuclear waste on nuclear superfund sites.
  
  That they haven't means they believe nuclear power is harmful to their health and that of their kids.
  
  Why haven't the bankers bought the tract of land vacated after Chernobyl cheap and gotten the right to build a charter city where there is no government to relieve the current government of the costs of dealing with the power plant decays from the elements?
  
  Trump could build a hotel on top of the burnt out power plant and not need to pay to heat it, letting the residual heat do that for free!
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John Doran Oct 19, 2018

Slight problem here: Bjorn Lomborg seems to have swallowed the false science pill which has classified CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) as a pollutant & a catastrophic warming gas. It is neither: it's plant food, the basis of all life on Earth's land.

CO2's effect on Earth's climate is zero to negligible.

I recommend reading climatologist Dr. Tim Ball's little gem of a book:
Human Caused Global Warming, The Biggest Deception In History.
In only 121 pages, Dr. Tim exposes the deception, names names,
exposes the false science, the pseudo-scientists, the profiteering politicians, & their billionaire sponsors. A must read.
Their aim? A vast depopulation & a totalitarian world govt.
Website: drtimball.com

I also recommend Prof. Ian Plimer's much more substantial 500 page book:
Heaven and Earth, global warming: the missing science
This contains over 2,000 ref's to peer-reviewed papers etc & is well indexed.

John Doran.
- Paul Friesen Oct 19, 2018
  
  So who should we believe - The vast majority of scientists or your tiny minority of industry lobbyists?
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Bernhard Kopp Oct 18, 2018

Even the OECD-countries need growth. Otherwise they drown in debt, and cannot meet the commitments made under the entitlement programs for health care and pensions. The crux with the academics is that they are highly privileged in their personal circumstances, and a high percentage can expect a comfortable government pension and first-class health care for life.
- Paul Friesen Oct 19, 2018
  
  Government debt is strictly a manufactured problem caused by the lack of willingness of governments to tax enough to cover spending. We should not destroy the planet just so that governments can pander to their electorates in this way.
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Mirek Fatyga Oct 17, 2018

what we need to tackle is the monumental, mind numbing failure of scientific institutions to stand up for science and to defend scientific integrity in the face of political assault. Not unlike many media outlets, scientific institutions chose access and funding over science.

It is imperative that we start having an honest, no holds barred discussion about the realities of science and scientific institutions, their incentives and their recent record, or else we will lose science as an instrument of public policy. Nobody should be surprised when some sort of fascism follows.
- Michael Pettengill Oct 21, 2018
  
  What about economists who advocate capital destruction and paying worker less and not paying them to build capital to make capital increasingly scarce so the price inflates?
  
  Explain why land that is productive in forest and farming should be destroy by coal mining just to burn the land, leaving land unproductive for centuries at a minimum because restoring the land to productive farm land requires paying too many workers too much money to restore the soil to its previous high productivity.
  
  And the Trump's of the world do not bid higher prices for the land after all the land that can be burned has been burned to cut the need to pay workers to produce energy, and then build resorts that rich people will pay thousands of dollars per day to visit.
  
  No scientist is paid more money to say that the typical mine site and coal ash site is undesirable to farmers and resort real estate developers based on the science of healthy soil, or the refusal of rich people to live in places they will be exposed to heavy metals, among other things.
  
  Resort builders like Holland where massive investments in capital assets including windmills that pump water over an extremely costly dike to create productive farm land. The power generating wind mills that are technologically obsolete are attractive, but not coal plants that lack costly pollution controls or costly disposal of coal ash back into the mines they came from, or even turned into productive building supplies by paying workers.
  
  Today's mainstream economists are free lunch economists. They claim that by slashing labor costs and letting capital decay and not paying workers to build new capital, GDP growth and wealth will increase more rapidly. Consumer spending increases not from higher wage income, but from borrowing money based on the inflated price of increasingly scarce capital. In essence, a free lunch. Tax cuts funded by increased government debt to fund increased consumer while wage income falls or remains stagnant.
  
  It's not like there isn't lots of needed capital to build to promote business interests in the US. But paying workers to build capital is claimed to cost too much and thus kill jobs. Thus there is no building of capital to make moving goods and people easier and faster so more capital can lived in at lower prices for the houses or lower rents. California has plenty of vacant land, but no capital to make building capital on it viable, no roads, railroads, water, sewer, schools, stores. Oddly stores dont get build where there are no people because there are no roads, or places for families who need water, sewer, schools, etc.
  
  Economies are zero sum and in the long run, GDP can't be higher than the cost of paying workers, so demand cost cuts, which means paying workers less, will result in GDP falling.
  
  The poverty in Africa is caused by living costs being too low, not too high. Too little money his paid to workers to build capital. China has been rapidly increasing the cost of living by building lots of new capital and then requiring workers to pay to use it. E.g., living full time on the farm at $2 a day instead of much higher living costs in remote cities building transportation capital that increases daily living costs, then paying a huge amount to pay to use the capital to travel back home for new years, creates the 5-10% GDP growth.
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Lawrence Lipp Oct 17, 2018

Did they recommend no growth everywhere or just net 0 growth?

Net 0 growth could imply that the wealthier countries (like the US) should adopt negative growth policies so that the poorer countries can have room to grow without us destroying the environment?

While this would mean a lowering of the standard of living for the wealthiest going forward, any liberal should understand the necessity of this.
- Michael Pettengill Oct 21, 2018
  
  As a liberal, I see fighting climate change as high growth, paying millions of more workers to build capital like wind and solar farms, battery and other storage capital, electric vehicles, capital, factories like Elon Musk Gigafactories, capital, ground source heat pumps - drill baby drill - capital. The cost of living increases to paying higher wage incomes to more workers so workers can easily paying the higher living costs.
  
  Growth when government policy required paying workers to build more costly capital was higher than since Reagan and Newt sold Americans on free lunch economics of cutting costs to consume more with lower wage incomes. No American free lunch economist demands prices be slashed when labor costs are cut, instead advocating higher profits. GDP growth has been fueled by higher and higher debt in both public and private sectors, since the 70s, with a lot of the money coming from outside the US, cash that came from killing jobs in the US to cut labor costs and increase profits.
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Lester Soss Oct 17, 2018

Mr. Born's polemical style is little off-putting. His use of "academic" as a pejorative fits in nicely with Trumpian/Exonmobile rhetoric. Furthermore, although it is true that if you are a farmer and you throw a party that uses up all of your seed corn, everyone who attends will have, for that moment, a better life. Not so much next season though, Ask the plethora of mammals that are being driven to extinction, or, for that matter, the residents of Mexico Beach in Florida, or Houston Texas how much better their lives now are. Perhaps he should read the Rockstrom article that precedes his.
- GREG CARLSON Oct 18, 2018
  
  Mr. Soss-
  
  What I see is that the conflation of income inequality agendas with the need for more rapid adoption of technology that will eliminate CO2 emissions only delays progress. There will always be a substantial (if not majority) of the population that has a negative reflex to inequality prescriptions, which leads to political fights and delays.
  
  As an individual - perhaps living in a Silicon Valley suburb isn't the right action for change. Do as I do - live in an urban center. I haven't owned a car in 14 years. I can walk to get the food I need. You have the power to change that now. Get moving and stop stalling progress.
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Paul Friesen Oct 17, 2018

I have no idea if the author is characterizing the position of the people at these conferences fairly. To me, it would be rather absurd to say that poor countries do not need further growth. But it is not at all absurd to say that rich countries are already rich enough - richer, in fact, than is good for the planet.

The author says that " The cleanest places are not the poorest countries, but the richer economies that have cleaned up their act." True enough if you look at things like particulates, sulfur dioxide, or garbage blowing around. But not even the slightest bit true if you look at carbon dioxide. The world's richest countries emit far more of that per capita than poor countries, and that is shaping up to be the biggest problem we face.

The world's richest countries should not be trying to grow further. Rather, they should concentrate on reducing inequality. More wealth for the richest of their inhabitants is essentially wasted because many people have so much that more does not even make them happier. After a certain point, wealth becomes nothing but a status symbol conferring bragging rights. On the other hand, most countries have at least some people who really do need more for a decent life.
- GREG CARLSON Oct 18, 2018
  
  I disagree on inequality needing to be a primary metric. Primarily because it raises unnecessary ire from a large portion of the power structure, which leads to no change, a much worse outcome than the significant progress we can make with other targets.
  
  Focus on adoption of technology that is zero or reduced CO2. At the power plant level, the transportation level. Incentivize that and we will be a better off global society.
  
  Who would have imagined 30 years ago the ozone layer would be near repair. We took a tactical approach to CFCs and it's worked remarkably well at a global level.
  - Paul Friesen Oct 19, 2018
    
    The thing about CFC's is that they were pretty cheap to replace. That is not true of CO2, at least so far. It may be that cheap solar power and cheap battery storage will come along and save us by becoming more cost effective than polluting energy sources, but I wouldn't count on it.
    
    There is another reason to worry about inequality - it is getting worse in rich countries, and is likely to get a whole lot worse. Technology may produce cheap solar power, but it may also produce artificial intelligence able to render most or all human labour redundant. A basic income, paid for by sales taxes, could address all these problems. It would reduce inequality. It would reduce the incentive to work, but that's a feature, not a bug. The economy would slow down, we would get the benefit of the technology in reduced stress and inequality, and more leisure. And CO2 emissions would go down, whether or not we can get off fossil fuels.
    
    We could also use carbon taxes to pay for at least part of the basic income, producing incentives to develop all those fancy new things.
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