These Are Boom Times for ‘Degrowth’
By Ephrat Livni, The New York Times.
Excerpt: There’s long been one mantra in mainstream economics: Growth is good. Gross domestic product — the monetary value of a country’s goods and services — is used to measure the economic health of a country or region, and a line that slants upward and to the right is typically what national leaders want to see. But recently, an alternative term has begun taking root in popular culture and policy: “degrowth.” Degrowth challenges the capitalist pursuit of growth at all costs and “focuses on what is necessary to fulfill everyone’s basic needs,” said Kohei Saito, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and author of “Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto.” ...Societies should be striving to create “a different kind of abundance,” he says, offering free education, medical care and transportation instead of continuously making more goods for consumption. ...Mr. Saito believes part of the reason degrowth has had increasing appeal is because “younger generations are not enjoying the fruits of economic growth” and are suffering from stagnating wages, unstable employment, rising rents and climate change. The idea is not entirely new. The first documented use of degrowth in the economic and ecological context was in 1972, when the French social philosopher André Gorz asked whether production should be scaled back for environmental balance. He used the French term, “décroissance.”....