Debunking Degrowth, part II
“Degrowth” doesn’t make any sense, harmful even, so why don’t we wise up and stop using it? I’ll try and explain...
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, […] it becomes your destiny” — Lao Tzu
For a long time, the term “degrowth” has intuitively been annoying me. Language implies intent as it unfolds its words into programable actions. What if it’s bugged? Will it misdirect our actions? We are badly lacking a coherent vocabulary and an effective epistemology to guide us into the future. Let’s unravel it. I’m no linguist, so feel free to correct me.
The verb “grow” can be transitive “he grows trees” as well as intransitive “trees grow”. Both are grammatically correct uses, even “trees grow trees”. But the verb’s ambiguity doesn’t fall neatly into the ambitransitive category. That is the first marker. Also, it doesn’t help that it covers a very wide spectrum: raising, planting, taller, bigger, increase in size, number, strength, quality, exists, lives, sprouts, develops, becoming older, and more.
So the combination “the economy is growing” could grammatically convey both:
- “the economy is increasing in size”
- “the economy is developing”
At first glance, they seem to have a similar meaning, yet they are fundamentally different. It’s easier to see when you try to reverse its meaning by adding the prefix “de”. “De(in)crease” works grammatically and remains a valid sentence. But “de-develop” doesn’t and would have to transform into “degrade” or “collapse”.
- “the economy is decreasing in size”
- “the economy is degrading”
Now both meanings start to deviate. Reversing for a second time widens the gap even further. As “regrading” doesn’t work in this context and would have to be changed to “re-developing”. “The economy is re-developing”
- increasing — decreasing — increasing
- developing — degrading — re-developing
A second marker. What is happening here? Somewhere in the etymological evolution, the verb has lost precision. The English verb “grow” traces back to “gruowan” in Old High German, which branched off from the Indo-European language stem. But in the Italic branch, the later Romance languages, or perhaps still its root, the verb “grow” translates on the one hand to “crescere” in Latin, “croître” in French (vulgar Latin), meaning becoming bigger, to increase in number. And on the other to “pulsare”, “pousser”, to beat, to live, to sprout. This should come as no surprise to anyone speaking Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese or French.
Economical growth hence cannot translate in French to “pousse économique”, but solely to “croissance économique”. Its reverse “economical degrowth” to “décroissance économique”. This is significant.
Crescere is reserved for that which is measurable and pulsare solely for natural irreversible processes. Now we can understand why “increasing” is reversible and “developing” is not. Accumulation in Latin is not the equivalent to growing. Plants grow, animals grow, performing cellular metabolism. The rest simply doesn’t. Numbers don’t. They aggregate. They follow the straightforward rules of accounting and get added up. That means that they can also be subtracted but never “degrown” and by default neither the numbers representing our economy. They increase or decrease but never grow. Hence the expression “economical growth”, in the sense of aggregation, is nonsensical and must be replaced by the correct expression: our “economy increases” or “decreases”.
The near-religious degrowth movement has faced criticism on this point. So much so that Jason Hickel felt it necessary to carefully redefine “degrowth” as “a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”[1] The initial narrative is thus brought back to a “planned economical decrease”. Usually meaning less put-through. Whether that is a sensible thing to do and how that will bring about an “improvement of human well-being” remains open. We are not out of the woods yet. As we can see in French, “grow” also translates to “development” and this angle is still in play.
Understanding what defines an “economy”.
In many definitions, the term “wealth” can substitute “economy” [2] and refers to “the accumulation of scarce resources.” [3] Kicking the can down the road to defining “accumulation” and “scarcity of resources”.
Accumulation is measured in either “real goods” or “money value”. “Goods” refer to a resource in the sense of utility, yet exclude all goods that are abundant and free. The more an important resource is scarce the more valuable it becomes. So an absolute value for example in tonnages of coal conveys less meaning than the relative value it represents to society.
“Relative value” is the hard part. The much-used heuristic is to convert it straight into a monetary evaluation. But the problem here is that money is by no means an absolute measure. It has no intrinsic value, it’s a figment of our imagination, a social construct. The values it denotes are continuously fluctuating, depending on context. You can’t eat the Mona Lisa, does then a 1000% rise in its appreciation compute to our wealth? What does this convey and really mean? What about the reverse, during a famine or hyperinflation, when its value practically decreases to zero?
“Relative value” poses also another problem: the more a stock diminishes and the more people that want it, both result in a rising value. According to this perverted logic, depletion and population growth will increase the wealth of the owners of its stock. But intuitively this doesn’t quite sit right.
Also, how do higher efficiencies, energy and materials put to work more effectively to produce added value, compute in this equation? What happens when we go even a step further and tap into the use of free natural energies, self-growing renewable materials, more entertainment services like music, theatre, film and the development of knowledge through science and innovation? Many of these can largely be decoupled from the use of non-renewable resources, nearing zero marginal cost.
It’s all very confusing. We seem to be adding incoherent entities and the results seem to be steering us in the wrong direction. How do we even know what the good direction is? An aggregation and put-through of dug-up coal, doesn’t automatically equate to “development”. We seem to have muddled our sense of directionality. How can we measure “development” if not by “aggregation”? It is this dilemma that is at the heart of the “growth-degrowth” discussion.
There must be a dimension by which we can measure and compare these various activities more objectively. I realise that the measure itself is only a means to an end. For a discussion “to what end”, I refer to Part I. The set of human economic endeavours, like those mentioned above, can all be reduced to matter, energy and information being moved about. Categorised by directionality: entropy increase, disorder on the one side of the balance sheet and entropy reduction, negentropy, the redeployment to a higher level of order, on the other. (McHarg)
The creation and maintenance of complexity, consequently the reduction of chaos, requires a constant input of energy. Within living systems, this also occurs whenever information is stored (Gatlin). Here, energy is used to rearrange molecules which then become and store information. In their turn they can become actors that instruct new actions, aligning energy with matter. All matter thus represents yet unrealised future possibilities.
Interestingly it’s an old idea. The Tao describes it as the “uncarved block”, capable of infinite characterisations, all possible ordered worlds, “Pu”. And today's quantum mechanics arrive at the same point: all possible outcomes are out there. The bigger the uncertainty of what is to become, the better. So the more and unwisely we use up our global material and energy stocks, like hitting peak oil, the more our global entropy increases, the bigger our loss in future potential becomes and the less we can evolve on the evolutionary ladder.
If we want to evaluate human activity it all boils down to whether information, future uncertainty, is being gained or lost in the process. Are our future choices and potential increasing or decreasing, thus being compromised? (Shannon). Aggregation therefore must be measured in terms of entropy.
“Development means“improvement in country’s economic and social conditions”. It refers to improvements in way of managing an area’s natural and human resources. In order to create wealth and improve people’s lives.” (sociologydiscussion.com) [4]
As the verb “develop” means “to bring out the capabilities or possibilities and to bring to a more advanced or effective state” it can be linked to the measure of entropy. Its directionality “less”, we evaluate as “development”, “more” as a sign of “decay”.
“Under a model in which GDP is fixed — under conditions of stable energy, a stable population, steady-state economy: if we accumulate knowledge, improve the quality of life, and thus create an unambiguously more desirable world within which to live, doesn’t this constitute a form of economic growth?” I had to concede that yes — it does. This often falls under the title of “development” rather than “growth.” I don’t think I ever would have explicitly thought otherwise, but I did not consider this to be a form of economic growth.” (Murphy) [5]
But if you really want to link growth to development you still face a dilemma. If “aggregation directing towards reduction in entropy is called development” then growth can’t be both the aggregation (the put-through in numbers) as well as its directionality. Both the underlying variable as well as its own derivative. It’s either or. Consequential if it were a choice. But it’s not, as we have seen, numbers linguistically can’t “grow”. So “development” is the only meaning left. Hickel’s “degrowth” thus automatically means “away from” development. A decrease in societal complexity and potential, heading towards decay. Not quite the “improvement of human well-being” he claims to be aspiring for. Hence my intuitive dislike of the word and why it’s so vital we really understand the language (and math) we wield.
The good news is that many of the measures that are being taken, like the C2C approach, regenerative farming, biodiversity protection as well as definitions used to evaluate our societies: increasing aggregate [thermodynamic] efficiency (Rifkin), freeing up time (Tainter), creative fitting to achieve health (McHarg) without compromising the ability of future generations (Brundtland) are pointing in the right direction: development.
Amsterdam, September 15th 2022
Gerald Lindner
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14747731.2020.1812222
https://gl-10190.medium.com/debunking-degrowth-5c11ae794d1d
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wealth.asp
https://www.sociologydiscussion.com/society/development-meaning-and-concept-of-development/688
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
