Traffic in Dhaka: Pollution and congestion are two costly consequences of economic growth. joiseyshowaa/Flickr. Some rights reserved.In the 1970s, the emphasis was on resource limits. The French term décroissance (later translated into English as degrowth) was used for the first time by French intellectual André Gorz. In his book Ecology and Freedom, published in 1977, he wrote that “lack of realism consists in imagining that economic growth can still bring about increased human welfare, and indeed that it is still physically possible.” As the authors of the book “Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era” explain, Gorz was inspired by the work of the intellectual pioneer of ecological economics Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity because of the entropy law. The discipline of ecological economics later went on to theorize that the economic system is embedded in the ecological system.
A brief history of degrowth
At the turn of the millennium, the driving force of the degrowth narrative became the criticism of the idea of development and infinite economic growth. Public debate on the oxymoronic nature of the term ‘sustainable development’ was sparked by the influential books of French economic historian Serge Latouche. His critique aims to counteract the hegemony in the public debate of infinite economic growth as a one-way future for the whole of humanity. It is the automatic association of ‘growth’ with ‘improvement’ that this perspective sought to dismantle through the term ‘degrowth’. Today, the rhetoric in mass media and politics frequently reinforces the public’s association of growth with an improvement in well-being, despite mounting evidence that in developed countries this is no longer the case.
At the turn of the millenium [...] 'degrowth' meant dismantling the automatic association of ‘growth’ with ‘improvement’.
