Degrowth: Even Worse than Agenda 2030!
The Guardian piece (link below), by Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel, presents degrowth in its most respectable clothes. Growth is a doomed strategy, they say. Scarcity is manufactured. Poverty and climate damage are the same system. The rich North burned the carbon budget; the poor pay first. The answer is a "roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth": rights as the organising principle, public provisioning, employment guarantees, living wages, workplace democracy, public control of strategic assets, credit steered by politics, debt justice, climate reparations, and a global economy redesigned so that GDP is no longer the test of success. Low-income countries may still grow a little. Everyone else is to stop treating expansion as the point. More than four hundred people from UN agencies, governments, unions and grassroots movements spent eighteen months producing the plan. The tone is pastoral. The contents are a planned contraction of the growth engine that has, for all its ugliness, been the only reliable mass exit from destitution.
That is the misery the manifesto underprices. Extreme poverty collapsed over the last two generations in the places that industrialised, traded and raised output per person. Food, vaccines, literacy, infant survival and years of life tracked energy use and capital accumulation, not UN roadmaps. A world that deliberately throttles that process in the name of planetary boundaries does not freeze a comfortable present. It freezes the capital stock, the tax base and the surplus that pay for the hospitals, grids and pensions the authors want to expand. Recessions already throw people onto food banks. A political project that treats recessionary logic as virtue, and then adds rationing of energy-intensive activity, will not spare the bottom tenth. It will hit them first, because they have the least buffer and the most need of cheaper goods, longer working lives and the next increment of productivity.
The authors concede that poor countries still need roads, clinics and power. They then load those countries with a moral ledger of colonial extraction, unequal exchange and debt service, and propose that the North shrink while transferring resources and accepting "non-domination." In practice that is a recipe for less investment, not more dignity. Capital flees uncertainty. Credit guidance and public seizure of "strategic assets" are words that, in every country that has tried them at scale, have meant shortages, black markets and a new class of allocators. The claim that growth decoupled from shared prosperity is an argument for better distribution and more housing and energy supply, not for making the pie smaller. If wages stagnated and services were cut while GDP rose, the failure is political and institutional: planning law, education, energy policy, labour-market design' not the existence of growth.
The ecological brief is treated as if physics had cancelled economics. A finite planet does not imply a finite measured economy. Value can rise while material throughput falls; that is what decoupling and substitution are. They are incomplete and uneven. They are still the only path that has ever cut emissions while keeping living standards from collapsing. Degrowth treats "less necessary production" as if a committee could name it without becoming the committee that decides whose job, flight, steak or heating is unnecessary. Rich-country contraction does not automatically free ecological space for the poor. It can just as easily shrink the export markets, technologies and fiscal transfers the poor use. Crop failures and heat are real. So is the misery of an India or Nigeria told that the ladder used in Seoul and Shenzhen is now closed for reasons of justice.
The political package is not a neutral toolkit that happens to attract Left signatures. It is the same coalition language that runs through contemporary progressive institutions: care work as a central metric, suspicion of ordinary labour markets, universal public provisioning as first resort, "who gets to shape the transition," Indigenous and feminist organising as the legitimate future, and historical guilt as a claim on present output. Critics who call this a woke-adjacent agenda are not inventing a conspiracy. They are reading the signatories and the vocabulary. Degrowth in this form is not "use less coal." It is a redesign of property, work, credit and speech about national success, justified by climate and poverty at once so that dissent looks like cruelty. James Lindsay and others have made the comparison to earlier planned leaps that promised abundance through political command and delivered less of everything except official morality. The analogy is overdrawn if it requires a secret politburo. It is not overdrawn as a warning about incentives. When the measure of virtue is reduced throughput and the measure of vice is GDP, the people who live by making things will lose, and the people who live by administering the reduction will not.
Poverty is not "manufactured" in the sense that a different communiqué can unmake it. It is the default of agrarian and pre-industrial life. What was manufactured, over a short and dirty century, was the surplus that made mass literacy and antibiotics normal. Dismantling the rules that produce that surplus, while keeping the rhetoric of rights, is how you get greater misery than the harms the manifesto lists. Heat and inequality are bad. A world that cannot build, generate power or raise real wages because it has decided growth is the original sin will be hotter for the poor in a different way: fewer adaptations, weaker states, and a politics that explains the shortfall as unfinished justice. The better way was never "growth at any cost." It was growth of the things people need, cleaner over time, with governments that can tell the difference between a coal plant and a hospital. Degrowth, as this roadmap writes it, refuses that distinction and calls the refusal maths.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/10/economists-maths-growth-doomed-strategy-un-agencies-political-leaders