Abstract
In July 2013, a remarkable conference took place in a meeting hall of the French National Assembly in Paris. Current and former government ministers from France, Sweden, Greece, Spain, and Brazil, under the aegis of the president of France, François Hollande, met to explore nothing less than modern economic heresy: the abandonment of governments’ longstanding commitment to continuous economic growth—and its replacement, at least in the view of some attendees, with goals focusing on well-being, equality, and environmental health.
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Notes
- 1.
Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, “An Innovative Society for the Twenty-first Century” conference, Paris, July 12–13, 2013; goals from Dan O’Neill, “A Post-Growth Economy in France?” Center for Advancement of a Steady-State Economy blog, July 2013, http://steadystate.org/a-post-growth-economy-in-france/.
- 2.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Reports,” www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml, viewed October 28, 2014; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-being: Statement from the Board (March 2005); Johan Rockstrom et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (September 2009); WWF, Living Planet Report 2014 (Gland, Switzerland: 2014).
- 3.
Heinz W. Arndt, The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth: A Study in Contemporary Thought (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1978), 30.
- 4.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1936).
- 5.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Paris: OECD, 1960).
- 6.
Peter A.Victor, ed., The Costs of Economic Growth. (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2013).
- 7.
Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
- 8.
Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good; Ida Kubiszewski et al., “Beyond GDP: Measuring and Achieving Global Genuine Progress,” Ecological Economics 93 (September 2013): 57–93.
- 9.
Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977).
- 10.
OECD, Economic Policy Reforms: Going for Growth (Paris: 2014); OECD, Towards Green Growth. A Summary for Policy Makers (Paris: 2011).
- 11.
Tim Jackson, Material Concerns: Pollution, Profit and the Quality of Life (Oxon, U.K.: Routledge, 1996); Julian M. Allwood and Jonathan M. Cullen, Sustainable Materials – With Both Eyes Open (Cambridge, U.K.: UIT Cambridge, 2012).
- 12.
Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, Better Growth Better Climate. The New Climate Economy Report. The Synthesis Report (Washington, DC: 2014); Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy. !0 Years, 100 Innovations, 100 Million Jobs (Taos, NM: Paradigm Publications, 2010); Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Towards the Circular Economy, Vols. 1–3 (Cowes, Isle of Wight, U.K: 2012–14).
- 13.
Factor 10 Institute, www.factor10-institute.org. Before Factor 10 there was Factor 4; see Ernst von Weizsäcker, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use (London: Earthscan, 1997). After Factor 10, there came Factor 5; see Ernst von Weizsäcker et al., Factor 5: Transforming the Global Economy through 80% Improvements in Resource Productivity (Oxon, U.K.: Routledge, 2009).
- 14.
Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley, 2013); Smil uses dematerialization rather than decoupling, but for consistency decoupling is used throughout the chapter except where Smil is quoted directly; Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Earthscan, 2009).
- 15.
William S. Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-mines (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1865); Mona Chitnis et al., “Who Rebounds Most? Estimating Direct and Indirect Rebound Effects for Different UK Socioeconomic Groups,” Ecological Economics 106 (October 2014): 12–32; Mona Chitnis et al., “Turning Lights into Flights: Estimating Direct and Indirect Rebound Effects for UK Households,” Energy Policy 55 (April 2013): 234–50.
- 16.
Smil, Making the Modern World, 180. Smil’s primary focus is on materials other than fossil fuels, although when he does discuss energy and decarbonization he says that despite the ongoing process of relative decarbonization, “there is no imminent prospects for any major reductions in absolute emissions of CO2 . . .” (ibid, 154).
- 17.
Angela Druckman and Tim Jackson, “The Carbon Footprint of UK Households 1990-2004: A Socio-economically Disaggregated, Quasi-multiregional Input-Output Model,” Ecological Economics 68, no. 7 (May 2009): 2066–77.
- 18.
Thomas O. Wiedmann et al., “The Material Footprint of Nations,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2013, 1–6; M. Lenzen et al., “Mapping the Structure of the World Economy,” Environmental Science & Technology 46, no. 15 (2012): 8374–81; M. Lenzen et al., “Building Eora: A Global Multi-Region Input-Output Database at High Country and Sector Resolution,” Economic Systems Research 25, no. 1 (2013): 20–49.
- 19.
Wiedmann et al., “The Material Footprint of Nations,” 4.
- 20.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy: With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 113–14.
- 21.
Ibid., 114, 116.
- 22.
Peter A. Victor, Managing Without Growth. Slower by Design, Not Disaster (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2008); Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth.
- 23.
Tim Jackson and Peter A. Victor, “Productivity and Work in the ‘Green Economy’: Some Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Tests,” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1, no. 1 (June 2011): 101–08; Tim Jackson and Peter A. Victor, Green Economy at Community Scale (Toronto, ON: The Metcalf Foundation, 2013); Tim Jackson and Peter A. Victor, Does Low Growth Increase Inequality? (Guildford, U.K.: University of Surrey, 2014).
- 24.
Victor, Managing Without Growth. Figure 3–2 based on idem, 182.
- 25.
Giorgos Kallis, Christian Kerschner, and Joan Martinez-Alier, “The Economics of Degrowth,” Ecological Economics 84 (December 2012): 172–80; Peter A. Victor, “Growth, Degrowth and Climate Change: A Scenario Analysis,” Ecological Economics 84 (December 2012): 206–12; Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis, eds., Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (London: Routledge, 2014).
- 26.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
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Victor, P.A., Jackson, T. (2015). The Trouble with Growth. In: State of the World 2015. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-611-0_3
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