The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Timothée Parrique: "Degrowth: Slow is the New Cool"

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

On this episode, we meet with social scientist and researcher at the School of Economics and Management of Lund University, Timothée Parrique. What is degrowth, and how will it help define our future?  Parrique explains how the path to societal degrowth might unfold and the social and physical obstacles we may encounter on our way there. About Timothée Parrique: Timothée Parrique is a social scientist, originally from Versailles, France. He is currently a researcher at the School of Economics and Management of Lund University (Sweden). He holds a PhD in economics from the Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement (University of Clermont Auvergne, France) and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (Stockholm University, Sweden). Titled "The political economy of degrowth" (2019), his dissertation explores the economic implications of degrowth. Tim is the author of Ralentir ou périr. L'économie de la décroissance (September 2022, Seuil), a book adaptation in French of his PhD dissertation. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/32-timothee-parrique

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. This week we speak with Timote Parique. Tim is a social scientist and ecological economists originally from Versailles, France, now teaching at Lund University in Sweden. Tim has a PhD in economics specializing in degrowth and he's written numerous books and frequently blogs on the issues with green growth and energy and material decoupling. Tim is a passionate, bright young

man who I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast. In today's conversation, Tim and I discuss why infinite growth of any kind is simply impossible. And we define and unpack what degrowth is, what it looks like, how the path to degrowth may unfold, and what are the social and physical obstacles between here and there. Here is Timote Parique. You are quite young to understand all this stuff. When I was your age, I was watching Loveboat and Fantasy Island and not remotely thinking about these things other than my love for animals.

What was the eye-opener for you as to why the current economic system is not sustainable? And what sent you down the path that we're going to talk about today? For me, I was studying economics, absolutely unaware of anything having to do with the climate, the environment, biodiversity, all of that was really just for me completely disconnected for more daily life. in practice and in theory, and I started to study economics, and I was sent to Sweden for, you know, one of those Erasmus exchange. And then I took a class in sustainable development, and there was some, so I get confronted to very terrifying numbers. And then it didn't really square with what I've learned at university. I was like, that's like, like you're discovering, like the entire thing you thought was the world, was actually only a small part of the iceberg.

And now they're showing you the other part. And that's the. ugly part, the like being burned kind of part and you're like breaking out. So that's when I started to challenge the kind of economics I was taught. And I told myself, okay, learning economics is going to be a more difficult journey than I thought. And then you ended up getting your PhD on the link between energy and the economy, yes? Well, even more than that, the link between the economy and the rest of the living world, because when I study the biophysical metabolism of an economy, so we look at energy but also materials. So these are the two big flows. But then they translate into a number of things. So the energy you find in a dead barrel of oil is not the same energy being spent by bees when they pollinate your crop. I mean, both are energies. but they're in a very different manner. Like, same thing.

The material, the lithium you're going to find in the ground is not going to be the same material as the solid waste. You're going to be picking up in a pond. So physically, it's all energy and matter. But biologically, it takes a variety of forms. And of course, the economy is transforming these. We're turning some of these clean, nice, useful, and forms of energy and materials,

and where Sam transforming them and putting them in other places. And sometimes that creates a bunch of problems. So that my PhD was not only on this, because this is really the starting point of ecological economics, so meaning this school of economics that look at the economy as embedded in the biosphere. When you start to look at the economy as embedded in the biosphere, where you realize that the idea of endless economic growth, producing and consuming more and more every year,

That's going to be very difficult to hold against the nature that is finite. So that's what brought me to study economic growth from this bioeconomic perspective and then to also study and that the main topic of my thesis, the counter mechanism, so the idea of degrowth, putting a macroeconomy on a diet from a biophysical perspective, but so much more on the social perspective. I'm really looking forward to this conversation because in some ways it's like, talking to a younger, albeit more handsome version of myself. I want to have you do most of the talking, but we have a lot to cover. And I'll chime in on my opinions of this stuff. I mean,

you and I have only spoken once or twice, but when I read your tweets and I see your podcast, we're really following a similar path. So I'd like you to say in your own words, we're going to talk about green growth and degrowth and the link between energy and the economy and all these things. So let's get started. What is the issue with green growth? Why won't it work and why are people so wrapped up with the appeal of green growth? Well, I mean, before even asking if it works, a strategy as an option, we need to look at the past and being like, what did we manage to green?

So that's usually the first step in that discussion. Did we manage to somehow green not only our growth, but just our economic activity in general? So not only the extra bit that you've produced and consumed extra from last year, but just your entirety of the economy. And when we look at the empirical data we have on green growth, we see that some countries have managed to green some of their activities, usually a small portion, usually because they've just. delocalized, so they've exported their most polluting productions in other countries as they transition to service economies. But there's been a tiny bit of greening, but that is very small. And since in the same time, economies have gotten so much bigger, all of those efficiency gains have been just swallowed and counterbalanced by increasing volume. So that's what we call the rebound

effect. But what is green growth? That would be that we continue to grow our economies with less negative environmental impact or even an environmental improvement. So there are two kinds green growth as linked to the concept of decoupling. So decoupling, or you could say delinking, is the idea of detaching the growth of GDP, one indicator of economic activity and the variation in environmental pressures. So there are many of them like, like, for example, carbon emissions. So green growth would be increasing your GDP

and decreasing your carbon emissions. That economists would call that absolute decoupling compared to relative decoupling, which is you increase your GDP, you decrease your, let's say you slow down the increase of your emissions. So you're getting relatively more efficient, but that's what I've described before

since you're producing so much more, the few percent you manage to save every year They're just being swallowed by extra production. So most countries in the world, they've been in that situation of relative decoupling. They invest in eco-innovation. They manage to implement certain forms of sufficiency at the consumption level. But at the end of the day, because the rhythm of production increases so fast, that is not enough to reduce total footprint. So when we're talking about green growth, I mean, the goal at the end of the day is not just a green growth.

The goal is to have a green economy. So what is a green economy? It's an economy that is sustainable. So it's an economy that is just abiding to specific ecological budgets. You may have heard of planetary boundaries. So that's a framework often used by scientists developed at the end of the 2000 at the Stockholm Resilient Center in Sweden, where they represent the global economy as being just limited by nine ecological ceilings.

So climate change is a famous one. There is also biodiversity, the use of water, and many others. And those are giving us like boundaries we should not cross. So for me, a sustainable economy, as an economy that is just using extracting resources like they do in nature and rejecting pollutions like any economy do, but at a pace and at a volume that is not threatening the health of ecosystems. So right now, the priorities for us to get our economy that are now just at the level where they're not sustainable to this level that is sustainable.

So for me, like the issue of green growth is very small because that's only talking about the extra production we'll be having from one year to the next. But the broader question is today we already have a significant volume of production and consumption every year, even just, you know, the economy remains of a steady state. And even that steady state is far from being sustainable. So one issue is, how do we make sure that everything else would produce from now is as green as possible? The other issue is also asking the tough question of the skill of your economy. Can this scale be maintained in time? That's why I have a problem with the word sustainable. I think what we're shooting for is something more or significantly more sustainable than we have now.

But to be truly sustainable as in it can be sustained without environmental impact, the scale of the economy would have to be vastly smaller than today's, yes? Absolutely. We're used to talk about the carbon budget. Now, people know. So a carbon budget is limited. It's a limited number of tons of carbon you can emit if you don't want to cross dangerous boundary of global warming. But for every single use of a resource, you have a similar budget.

So a water budget, a biomass budget, a metal budget, you know, all of these, anything that having to do with nature, you have to follow its own pace. It's like imposing a speed limit on economic activity. So when you're doing ecological economics, you have to be, okay, what is the biophysical budget that I have? That's the first question where you define the scale, the economy. And then you can ask yourself a bunch of other questions after, what do we produce, how do we produce it, and all of that. But that skill issue is extremely important, especially in a world that is already in a state of overshoot. The problem with that state of a shoot is that we are living in a world where poverty remain, where there is significant production and consumption,

that will be needed in the global south. So that put, let's say, an extra pressure for the global north to be like, okay, not only do we need to be sustainable, that's nice for us, but we need to minimize the use of natural resources so we can maximize, create as much space as possible for prosperity in regions of the world that will need more energy and materials.

So let's get back to the decoupling question. Many international economic forecasts like the International Energy Agency, BP, the UN, have forecast for continued economic growth through mid-century, through 2050, 2050. And they all are showing a growth in energy consumption, but they're showing that GDP will grow much faster than energy consumption. So that would imply a decoupling of economic growth and energy use. What do you think about that? In my research, I mean, I call that a GDP-led decoupling. So let's say it's GDP that is rising so fast and so fast, and maybe your energy consumption is just increasing a tiny bit.

If you're a climatologist, that's not what you want. I mean, we want to reduce absolute impact. So we know we need to reduce emissions. So all of these projection, the best they manage is a stabilization of our emissions or a very slight decrease, like something in the realm of 1, 2, 3% per year. Where we know scientists tell us that, you know, stick to the 1.5 degree climate threshold. We're rather aiming for double digits reductions yearly in high income countries. So that's why for me that brings me with the inevitability of degrowth.

We'll see later that there are many good reasons. of doing that and that actually it's a nice opportunity to reorganize our economy so it functions better. But even if that wasn't the case, we would have to do it because there's just no way we can maintain. That's the thing. The longer you maintain a state of overshoot, ecological overshoot, the more you're taking the risk of degrading ecological ecosystems, the more you degradeing ecosystems, The more you degrade ecosystems, the less they produce resources for you. So the more your budgets are actually shrinking. So the more you are in overshoot.

And so the more you go and degrade ecosystems. And at the end of these cycles, you get dead oceans, you know, disappearance of bees and biodiversity loss. The heat waves we're witnessing now, the loss of soil, fertility, all these kind of stuff that become extremely problematic for us to do the kind of things that maintain us alive, like growing. food and just living in cities where it's not 40 degrees. The challenge is, though, that we're not optimizing for ecosystem health and reducing the impact of overshoot. We're optimizing for the energy metabolism that grows our financial economy, which is tethered to an energy economy.

So before we get into what we should do or what is likely to happen, I'm just asking you the feasibility, just from a biophysical perspective of energy and GDP decoupling. I know from prior data that globally, the correlation historically has been around 0.993. Every one unit of new GDP, we've used 0.993 units of new energy. that's been declining a little bit in the last decade, and maybe you could speak to the reasons why. But I want you to just articulate the best you can, the relationship between energy and GDP historically and in the future.

I'm going to propose a new start for this. Let's think about what GDP is. I mean, most people don't know what's calculated. It's a very abstract indicator, but at the end of the day, it's supposed to be an estimation of production and consumption, right? So especially an indicator of production, so what an economy produces. In fact, GDP is closer to an indicator of economic agitation.

So it measures, you know, the activity of the monetary activity of an economy. When you see this, like when you hear production, when you hear activity, that means energy. You don't have energy. There's Steve Keen that says the difference between a worker without energy is a cadaver And a machine without energy is a sculpture. So I think you could agree on a number of social conventions on how to measure GDP and try to make it more and more abstract so that it disguises the fact that an economy uses natural resources. But at the end of the day, I think you cannot get away from the fact that any single human activity more or less directly relies on the energy. And so far, as you said historically, since the down of the Industrial Revolution, that has been fossil energy.

So that's been like, you know, this boom of very clean, very powerful energy source. That has just allowed us to do many things, to agitate in a way we could not agitate before. But that was a bit of a one shot. So now, if we have to do away with fossil energy, where are we going to find the energy to agitate ourselves? A question Europe is asking themselves right now. Exactly. So now it's the first time I'm talking from the French context where fossil companies, the government, they're appealing, they're just begging their citizens to go for sufficiency. The kind of policies that for decades they've been saying it's useless because we just need to clean production and then we'll have an unlimited bounty of just clean energy.

Now we realize that most of the economy still functions because of fossil fuel. And when that tap runs out, there is no other solution. Like, we have to consume less of it. And I'm like, now people are experiencing, like, one of the aspect of degrowth, the fact that with less energy available, well, that means we'll have to make certain choices. Do we want to use that energy to fabricate SUVs and fly private jets? Do we want to keep that energy to, you know, keep hospital runnings or just to do anything else? Do we want to keep that energy for people in France

or just save most of that energy for the building of vital infrastructure in the global south? Limited energy then means we have to choose. Whereas before, in the fantasy of growth and especially of grain growth, we didn't have to choose. Unbounded energy and forever increasing levels of production for everything.

So you were widely known as a de-growth scholar. You're the first person I've had on this podcast to talk about degrowth. So could you just give a couple minute overview of what is degrowth? And can we keep our current metrics of economic progress and still de-grow? Break it out for us. So I'm going to give you two definitions because, as you said, I'm a de-growth scholar. So, I mean, I'm an ecological economist, so I study the interaction between the economy and nature.

And I study that de-growth as a phenomenon. But de-growth is both a concrete phenomenon, which I will soon describe, and also a school of thought in the sense of, you know, people talk about a degrowth society, so meaning a society that has embraced some kind of values and principles in the same way that people talk about an eco-socialist society or post-capitalist societies, all these kind of things. So now we need to do de-growth is this very broad paradigm, integrating a lot of values and principles that have been developing the last two decades, that lead people to advocate for, and now that's now I'm giving you the definition of phenomenon that is.

degrowth, a downscaling of production and consumption. So that's the most minimal definition. I'm going to start there, a growing economy, produce and consume more from one year to the other. If today the economy is too big, we need to downscale. So smaller economy. And then I'm going to add a few things to make it more precise because now it's, well, it's pretty much, you cannot make the difference between degrowth and collapse or degrowth and recession. So it's a downscaling of production and consumption that reduce environmental pressures. So that's the first element. We're not doing this for fun.

It's like if at the end you downscale your economy, but you keep producing just only private jets and your footprint does not decrease, then what's the point? So downskilling to reduce environmental pressures. And then we add three other elements in a way that is democratic, socially just, and that improve well-being. So the socially just is here because of what I talked before.

Countries of various biophysical metabolisms, you get very obese economies in the US and Canada in some parts of Europe that use a lot of energy and material that will need to undergo a very severe degrowth because the degrowth your economy needs to go through is proportional to your ecological overshoot. So if you're like Costa Rica and you've just, you know, overshot one boundary out of nine, then it's fine. You will just have to reduce a tiny bit. That's not going to be drastic. Same thing. If we had started degrowth in the 1970s after the Meadows report, then it would have been like fairly easy. We would have reduced a few things and then the economy could have remained in a steady state. But we didn't do that. And 50 years later, most high income countries

have overshot big time. So that means big degrowth. So it needs to be done in a way that is socially just also taking into account. Not only historical responsibility. in the size of your economy, but also the needs of your population. So if you're in a country like France, where in theory, all the infrastructure we have, all the national income we have is sufficient to satisfy all the French people needs if it were to be split equitably. So here, like, growing more is not going to solve poverty or inequality. It's just a matter of distribution.

So you know that this country, you know, is just perfect candidate for degrowth. If you look at Madagascar, then we understand that that country has not overshut their planetary boundaries so that can actually afford to use more energy and more materials. And they should afford that because they need to increase their life expectancy, their levels of education. They need to build of these public services that you need to have a good quality of life. So here that's how we connect, you know, the degrowth in the north to allow sustainable development in the south. And I'm going to add one thing. So the two elements I've talked about sustainability, I've talked about social justice, but I've added also democracy and well-being.

The democratic aspect has to do with, in a growth economy, companies decide what to produce, investors decide what to expand. And there's not too much of the democratic discussions because we can do everything at the same time, or at least we thought we could with the bounty of fossil energy. But now we realize that we can't anymore. and we have to make some choices. Problem is, I mean, to make these choices, we need to put everyone at the table

so that these choices come to reflect the needs of everyone. So that's the importance of democracy that is so much more important in an economy that is shrinking that in an economy that is expanding. So that's the first point. And then concerning well-being, it's a diet, not an amputation. So we want to be able to do this

while maintaining quality of life. And even more, not only maintaining quality of life, But there could be possibilities, and I can talk a bit more about that later, of just undergoing this massive biophysical diet. And in doing that, actually increasing quality of life. So you could say that's the challenge of degrowth. I have like 14 questions. Go for it. So I too think that degrowth is coming.

Obviously, you're aware of that from watching my videos and reading my paper. But I don't think it's going to be a voluntarily, democratically, governance-based decision, but based on a reconnection of the financial claims versus our underlying energy and material economy. So does the degrowth movement writ large distinguish between voluntary and involuntary degrowth? Yeah, there's this book by a Canadian macroeconomist Peter Victor from 2008. And it was making a difference between degrowth by design and degrowth by disaster. I mean, for me, I'm using different terms. So when I'm talking about the disaster, I'm talking about recession, turning into depression,

turning into collapse. Because I want to keep degrowth, since it has turned in such a value-laden concept, just to very precisely describe that transition which I described is democratic, socially just, and that improves well-being. But we have to face that fact that today we have economies that stabilize themselves through growth. But we're also experiencing in most high-income countries what economists call a singular stagnation. So a slowdown, a generalized slowdown of rates of economic growth. So basically we've built growth dependent economies and now we're running out of growth.

And so that brings a whole lot of problem because a growth-based economy that cannot grow enters in recession and then in depression, cannot finance anything, cannot create new businesses, cannot create jobs, cannot redistribute properly. So it just completely stopped to function. So right now, we're going to get confronted to that. We've had a taste of it during the pandemic. We're getting a taste of it during the Ukrainian war. So another question is, the earlier we realized that we better just sit down and be like, you know what, let's just make the modification we need to adapt to our economy so it can prosper without growth. And in order to prosper without growth, we need to reduce the scale of it. That's the addition. So we need to just undergo that degrowth

transition to stabilize the economy at a steady state where we can have actually this well-being economy that can prosper without growth. So what is the possible governance structure that could even conceivably enable a massive degrowth of what you referred to as the obese countries, economically speaking, because I think individual people can voluntarily go on diets, but cultures do not. And I think we're seeing that with a rightward shift politically in many countries, including your own. And when economies were growing, democracy worked, but if economies are shrinking,

either voluntarily or involuntarily, how can the democratic governance process inform that? What are your thoughts on that? First of, I would be a bit hesitant in calling, you know, growth-based capitalism we have democratic. Because basically when you're looking at any economy is making decisions about what to produce and how to produce it. Today, these decisions are being taken by a minority of people that are either, you know, the managers of companies or just the shareholders that control the managers of companies.

That's a very small minority of people. So they decide what to produce. For example, they decide to keep extracting oil, even though all scientists and now a broad consensus has built to know that we need to stay at least 60% of all oil need to stay in the ground if we want to have a serious shot at avoiding climate collapse. They're not doing it because they have no manager interest in doing that. And because we don't have a democratic mode of production, then it's fine. They don't have to.

It's their company. They do whatever they want. and they follow their objective, which is to maximize returns to shareholders and their companies' profit. So I'm thinking anything we would do better than that would be more democratic. And something is simple as the French citizen convention for climate. So for those of you that haven't followed that, the response of the French government to the yellow vest was to form a randomly selected convention of 150 citizens and asked them,

well, okay, the government has failed to implement convincing climate plan. So you do it. You have access to experts. We pay you to take six months to sit down, look at this, give us proposals. We give you people to translate these proposals into laws. And then, you know, we'll just implement it. We can discuss this via referendums. That was an unprecedented exercise in democracy, I think.

And when you look at the 149 policies that came out of that, process. If there were to be implemented, I think degrowth would be a consequence of that. So people that have no material interest, they don't have shares in fossil companies, a random selection of people, which with high levels of inequality statistically is going to include a minority of very rich people that have an interest in keeping the economy growing because that makes them richer. Then people are going to be like, well, if we reduce production and consumption, if we keep some oil in the ground, anywhere, I'm not. not getting any money out of extracting them, but I'm getting a lot of well-being out of keeping

them in the ground because that means I'm not going to have like, you know, repeated hit waves that my children are going to have an habitable planet to live and all that kind of stuff. So I'm imagining now, like, to make these decisions about what to produce and how to produce it, we need to create pockets of democracy at many different places. That was an example, like citizen convention. Of course, you cannot do everything for a citizen convention to decide what kind of choose we're going to produce, but you can make sure that within companies, like it's already the case for cooperatives, you get a diversity of stakeholders that are sitting at the table. You know, how nice would it be in a big company when you're deciding what to produce

and how to produce it, that you have people that can represent, you know, ecosystems and their state. You have consumers representatives. You have worker representatives. And they're bugging. They're like, you will have the engineers being like, guys, I'm sick of this plant obsolescent. Like, honestly, do we really need to make washing machine that crap? And then the shoulders will be like, yeah, but I mean, that's just so nice, make so much money. Then they realize they'll vote and they're the only one benefiting from this.

The consumers are like, no, that sucks. I don't like my washing machine to break. The engineers, like, I don't like to make that. I feel ashamed. And the environmental scientist will be like, yeah, guys, we need to make things as durable as possible because we're short on materials. And if you were to do this, I think, you know, company by company, we would integrate this. social and ecological concern. So that's why for me democracy is so important. And I'm not saying it's easy, but I don't see any reason, any reason why we could not create all these democratic

forums at the level of the neighborhood, at the level of the city, at the level of the company, at the level of a sector, a region, a nation, and beyond. Well, first of all, I think there are biophysical momentum processes built in here. And it's not the fault of the corporations as much as it's the laws that I've been put in place that the corporations adhere to. Like maximizing profits is our cultural goal. And those are the institutions that are put in place. So, you know, one core question I have for you, and I don't expect you to have a good answer because I don't know anyone and that does, is what is the choreography that would lead to corporations and society at large pursuing some objective other than maximizing monetary profits, tethered to energy,

tethered to environmental damage? When you ask people, like, they're for growth, they're like, yeah, yeah, of course, because they associate it with progress. But if you turn that question around, and because growth at the, because growth at the level of economy translate into companies producing more, each of them. And so you're like, okay, to have a growing economy, we need to have for-profit companies that just whatever they do, they need from one year to the other to boost their profit, because that's the best way we found on how to maximize production.

I think 99.9 people in the street would tell you no, like businesses should not just make money. They should, you know, have a mission and produce useful things. they should care about their workers and their community, this kind of stuff. If that is true, then we realize there's no reason to keep the for-profit private company in existence. So we could just decide that legally, every single company should have a mission that is concrete in the sense that is not the abstract pursuit of profit.

And that mission, and that's the case again for a few cooperatives around the world, They have a mission that mission is evaluated periodically by a multi-stakeholder board that is looking at, okay, did you manage to satisfy your needs like your social targets, your ecological targets? Do we need to produce something different? Do we need to produce less? Do we need to use a different technology? So then production would cease to be this kind of accumulative process where you're always trying to sell more cut costs so that you boost profits. And cutting cost very often means degrading working condition, degrading the quality. quality of product and deteriorating the environment more. So then if you integrate this, we would get a production that is so much more qualitative. And I think that it will be in the interest of the great majority of people.

It also resonate with common sense production. I'm always telling this to my students. I mean, look at the things you produce at home. Let it be, you know, a service when you clean your kitchen or when you do gardening or, like, what kind of mentality do you apply? Do you have this kind of blind productivity where I'm just taking care of my kids, just minimizing the time I spend

trying to be most efficient? I was like, no. When I'm taking care of my kid, their well-being is number one. Of course, I don't want to spend like 12 hours, you know, changing a napi, so I'd have to be efficient. But somehow, if it comes to just against the well-being of the baby,

then I'm not doing that technique. I'm not choosing that. So the thing is we apply it every day. with our friends, with our family, with our community. So why every single time we just wear a suit and go to our company, we need to apply a completely different state of mind? It doesn't make sense. So I want people to imagine like the macroeconomy, I mean,

is just the aggregation of all our behaviors. But it does not transcend. There's nothing magical about it. So in the same way that when you're planning your home economy, you know, you have limited time and you're caring about things and productivity is not everything. At the level of the economy as a whole is precisely the same thing. But we tend to forget it because it's easy and because we make decisions that we don't bear the consequences.

So you're a fossil fuel company. If I extract extra barrels, I get the money on my bank account this year. And other people in the global South get the negative consequences of global warming. So it's very easy for me to be like, well, that was worth it. I can use that money to send my kids to college. and I feel, you know, I've done a good thing. But if you tie it all together, if you have a systemic view, then you realize that actually the activity of a corporation

is just following the very much social and biophysical rules that an economic activity at the community level, or at least it should. Well, one thing that I totally agree with you on is not that I could ever change a nappy even in 12 hours, but the best things in life are free once our basic needs are met. And we're on this treadmill that we're being told and marketed and compelled to consume more every year. And I think more and more people are recognizing that this system is not working, not working for many people.

And people are scared about the future. So I do agree that making love with your partner and going and playing in the woods with your dog and digging. a garden, and these things don't require much exosomatic energy, and yet they contribute a great deal to our well-being. So how might we shift our society to maximize well-being that isn't tightly correlated with more energy and material consumption? Yeah, I think what you've said is fundamental. When all sociological studies we have that ask people,

during their life and especially at the end of their lives, you know, what made you the happiest. People don't tell you like, oh, my SUV, my connected fridge, that was sweet. No, like, you know, the people I've been in love with, my family, you know, the tree have planted that is now like super big, the fact that I somehow managed to, you know, build a choir that we sung for years, you know, all of these, actually, they're going to be talking about what Armandale was calling, like, ultimate ends. they're going to be talking with something that is quite immaterial. So, of course, in order to do this, you need some materials.

So let's say you need a room with a mic to meet and a piano so you can sing with your choir. But you don't need to produce, you know, increase 2% and the growth of piano every year. So right now we're just, the concept of a well-being economy is precisely this, to just produce the things and then find a way to use them in the way that maximize well-being. I give you a very concrete examples. In France, everyone is a washing machine. You know, you have it in your basement. I suspect that the same in the U.S. and many other countries.

In Sweden, they share washing machines. So in every apartment in the basement, you have this industrial, very nice quality washing machine, and you can book a time and you share them. So that's why in Sweden they use wireless washing machines, but they get access to better washing machine. And as soon as their problem, you know, it gets full. fixed by a professional and these things can last for like super long time. So here we're looking at like they're maintaining the same quality of life concerning washing

machine, washing quality of life, but with so much less washing machine. And what does that mean? That's so important because that means not only then we can save some energy and material that we don't have to use, but also it means we don't have to spend time producing, selling, repairing, all of that, customers servicing, all of these extra washing machines. And so for me, that's when I talk about degrowth being a potential source of well-being. That's because producing less means we will be able to work less, which means we will liberate time to do whatever we want.

Some of these stuff will be productive. Maybe you'll just start to pick up gardening. Maybe you'll join the community garden and just have fun doing that. Maybe you'll start sewing your own clothes or maybe you'll just spend time in the forest with your dog. Most likely since you're going to be deciding what to do with your time, that's going to be more linked to your well-being that's your current job, especially if you have not chosen it and that's a difficult job. So for me, I see that's a huge untapped source of energy today that we could unleash with a degrowth transition. And it would probably benefit our social relations as well. If I have to go in the basement to do shared laundry is a good place to meet women or men and have a conversation, et cetera, as one example.

But we can imagine business as usual continuing for 10 or 20 or 30 years and all the deleterious impacts that that would have on the environment and society. Can you describe in a colorful, distinct way the world that we would live in in 10 or 20 years under a best case scenario where degrowth ideas are adopted or at least proactively responded to globally? What does our daily life look like different than today? Let's start with work, because that's quite concrete. I mean, for most of it occupies most of our days. so you wake up early, you go to work, you do something that you're being told to do, and that's how you get your money.

And with that money, you can go and buy stuff, and that stuff you can enjoy on the weekend with your family. So first, if we somehow work less, let's say divide working time by two, then it means there are going to be a lot more time. So your day is very unlike, we're not going to have these 40-hour shift. It's rather going to be like,

well, you're going to work 16 hours a week. I know that might be shocking from a non-European perspective, even from a European perspective. But in the kind of modeling I do for France, we're talking about a 15 to 20 working hour week. So that's the amount of time you spend in your paid job. Might not be the best job in the world, but that's what you're doing pretty much as much as today, except it's a nice not-for-profit cooperatives where you can participate in decision-making. There's a nicer working conditions and all of that, because there's no imperative to cut cost.

So that's the thing. So we can collectively decide to afford to work nice. Even if that means being slower, even if that means less productivity. You know, that means that people in a warehouse, they're like, we don't want vocal control. We're going to take the time to have breaks. We want to be able to laugh and to discuss. Even if that means, you know what, that it takes a bit more time. And instead of receiving your package in three days, you'll receive it in six days.

But you know what? If we decide that's what we want, perhaps that's. nice. So that's the first thing. And then you have all these available hours, which the way I imagine it, that's hours where we can create new extra economic institutions. I mean, often they call them commons. So commons is when we self-organize something. The Swedish washing machine. So for example, we have these washing machines. You have to decide of rules. Okay, how do we book it? All of these kind of social protocols. Same thing if you have a local currency or an object sharing network. These are very important. Same thing, if you want to organize, you know, the sharing of tools and books

and anything like this. And so you organize this tool library or this repair cafes, buy kitchens, you know, they cook this Fab Lab, they're making AccurLab, many different little institutions. They're like businesses, but they're run by the users. So they're just need focused. It's users coming together, pulling resources and using these resources to satisfy needs. So actually, these are much more fitting to the definition of when an economy is far. An economy is here to satisfy needs while economizing resources so we don't spend all our day working and producing stuff. We've forgotten that.

I want to measure the performance of a degrowth economy based on how much hours of undesired work it economize every year. And every year, I want the prime minister. to go on speech and be like, okay, guys, this year we went from, you know, 20 hours per week of non-chosen work, so the kind of stuff you have to do, to 18. And that's fantastic, because now these two hours you can do whatever you do, whatever you want. What we realize is when people do whatever they want, they don't just stay on the couch and watch TV. They go and talk to the neighbors. They do projects. They do science project. They just innovate. They solve

problems. So they actually just are much more, let's say, productive in a social, ecological, meaningful sense that if you just pay them to just do some telemarketing in a company that sells vacuums or connected fridges. Except right now, if we have two free hours, we probably will sit on the couch and go to Facebook or Instagram or something like that. So there would also have to be a cultural smorgasbord of new options for social recreation, interaction, interaction, action, et cetera. Completely. Now, like, we are living in a cultural desert.

I mean, unless you live in a very nice city and you have everything around you, if you're living in the suburbs, there's no much places to meet. But imagine how that could be different if, you know, we had all this little meeting spots. So for retired people, for example, if people are a bit on the fringe of society, then you can hang out at the Ripper cafes. You know how to fix bikes. So you can show the youth, you know, I was part of it. of a repair cafe in the southwest of France and you had a lot of retired people that would come

and they would just love it. They would just hang out, chill, drink tea and just teach like youngster to how to repair their bikes. It's a win-win because youngsters, they don't know how to repair the bike. They don't have the money to go to a shop to repair the bike. So for me, that's like, that's the kind of stuff. And then you create a culture where, well, instead of staying at home and watching TV and, you know, spending an hour to pick which movie I want to watch on Netflix, night, I'm going to go and hang out with the bike guys. You know, that's kind of fun. And then hanging out should be like, well, you know what? We started the choir with the bike club, ta-da, and we do all these things that all of us, that resonates with what we're already doing today. And I think if you were to

tell people, well, if we reduce the amount of stuff we produce and consume, so the commodities, this kind of monetary economy, you'll get more time to do that. I don't think a single person will be now, I'll take the connected fridge, or they're going to be very few. I so appreciate your enthusiasm and optimism on this. I'm going to push back on a couple things that I am deeply concerned about and see what you think. So three things. You said that degrowth means less material throughput, but with well-being, democracy, and less environmental pressures. Doesn't de-growth the way that I foresee it, which is an involuntary response to the,

inability us to kick the can anymore. Doesn't it imply more environmental pressures? For instance, last week, Deutsche Bank did some scenarios that if the natural gas storage areas in Germany are not filled by this winter and they won't be at least fully, then Germans are going to turn to forests and wood for heat in an increasing way. Same thing happened in Germany, I mean in Greece, in the great financial crisis, they had to hire armed guards to protect people from taking down the forests in the north of Greece. So as we use less fossil fuels, either by a democratic choice or by we just can't afford them, won't there be increased environmental pressure as the default response?

Well, I guess you said we need a new culture of consumption. This is why I said downskilling of production and consumption, because we need to move both in tandem. So the IPCC talking with sufficiency, give you three famous examples, so people just going vegetarian, so reducing the amount of meat day, they eat, stop flying, use your car less or even get rid of the car if you can and, you know, renovate the way you heat your home. If we were all going to do that, we would just phase out most of the needs for fossil fuel. So let's think about this, just as a thought experiment. So if now everyone in France at these nice little passive houses, we could have built because we know what to build them for decades. We don't do this because it's more expensive than just building this big salmon structure.

But we've only done that because this construction was handled by for-profit companies that were just cutting costs and tried to build it. as fast as possible to just make some money. If these had been organized as democratic not-for-profit companies, of course, they would have been, yeah, we're going to be passive homes. It's badass. You build something and then it's environmentally neutral. You can even create some energy.

If we had done this in the 90s or in the 70s when we've heard the meadows, today, I mean, we would be completely energy sovereign. So look how much resilient that make you. Then Russia say, okay, you know what? We stop exporting gas. And you're like, well, I don't care. I'll be able to heat my home like I do. So if I think if we manage to act on demand,

we can make ourselves much more resilient to a decrease in energy use, whether that is through collapse or through plant degrowth. I agree with the fact that in America we use 100 times more energy than our bodies need, and in Europe it's 50 times more. But what is the mechanism? Is it people like you acting as pilots, and examples of living differently, and that becomes culturally acceptable,

and there's a ground-up change in cultural priority, or is it a top-down, the prices of social and environmental bads are doubled and tripled, giving the better price signals on a conserving resources and innovating towards a resource-constrained future? Is it top-down or bottom-up or both? Both.

And there's like a triad of action I quite like, And that's the ban. I was thinking rationing. So rationing. So either you ban something or you ration it or you tax it. So for example, now the numbers we have about commercial aviation shows that very few people take planes and that most of these flights are taken by very rich people. So we could ban the expansion of airports straight away. That's top down.

Every time an airport wants to create a new land. they need to ask the government. Then the government says, just no, sorry, we don't want to expand new lines. Actually, if you're running national lines that have strain alternatives, a time equivalent, well, you will have to close, shut down that line in X number of years. So that's something you can ban, like the use of pesticides also. The EU now has just voted banning a fossil car, the selling a fossil car by 2035. So these kind of stuff, you can have top-down.

action to limit. And then what you cannot ban, then you can ration. I mean, same thing for the plane tickets. If you think, you know, that putting a tax on something is going to be unfair because in a high inequality environment,

then the rich can maintain the lifestyle without too much of a loss, then you can just ration them. In the same way that we already rationed so many things, like organs, and, you know, when you queue to a shop, like these kind of things. So there's a variety of tools,

fossil quotas, flying quotas, where you can just ration. And then there's this variety of other tools in the box concerning taxes. So this sounds a lot like the Klaus Schwab, a great reset. What do you think about that? Could you tell me a bit more about that? The kind of Davos crowd, the World Economic Forum, has something called the Great Reset, which is that no one will own anything and everyone will be happy.

and it's kind of a top-down redistributive sort of plan. I don't know the details, but I've read a little about it. I mean, the thing is you can envision a couple of top-down leverage point. And I like the concept of leverage point from Donila Mido's, the main author of The Limits to Growth Report in the 70s, because I really feel that's our situation now. You know the story of Aaron Ralston in the movie 127 hours, you know, this hiker that was stuck his arm under an heavy rock in Moab.

Oh, yeah. When hiking in the desert and got stuck like an idiot, that's us now. So we're stuck. And the only thing heavy that can lift the rock is some kind of state action because we're running against the power of corporations. So the state can use a bit of muscle power to lift the rock. But the snate is not going to tell you where to go. That's where actually we connect to the new culture of consumption.

People will have to just get together, reflect on their needs, create new patterns, you know, new ways of living, of working, of traveling. Does it have to be all states or can it be Denmark or France takes the lead? Because it seems like if we're talking about a CO2 as a problem and the global environment that one or two countries doing this won't be sufficient, what do you think about that? I mean, they're always frontrunners. If we come back to this thought experiment about having passive homes and I've reached energy sovereignty, I think every country now dreams of that. So we realize when New Zealand in 2019 ditches GDP and now we're going to be measuring our public policy and our country's prosperity based on well-being budgets with 65 indicators of social health and ecological sustainability, there's. They're not waiting to be like, oh, we need to agree at the level of the UN with everyone and convinced that we're just going to do it because it's good for us and it's actually

a responsible choice to do. So now I think I made a list of a lot of different countries moving in different directions. And I think countries learn from each other and look what they did in New Zealand and we can try this. Look what they did in Norway where they're just, you know, they have this kind of fee bait system to phase out heavy and polluting cars. And that, for instance, like, oh, we had a fee bait too. but it was only for emissions.

The Norwegian, they added for the weight of the car. And so they managed to face not only polluting cars, but also heavy cars, which are so much more dependent on materials. So they managed to reduce not only carbon footprint, but also material footprint. Oh, nice. Let's add this in. And then maybe at some point in other countries is going to realize, look, in France, they're just criminalized planned obsolescence since 2016. How did that go? What's going on?

And then us in France were going to be Luke in Vienna. They don't have for-profit housing. It's all social housing. How does it work? Can we learn from that? So I think now it's just we will never find the perfect country somewhere in the ocean that has achieved that, the perfect utopia. It's going to be the massive work of looking at like what functions here and there and just making an experiment to see what works. Is that a real example that France criminalized planned obsolescence?

Yeah, it is. I didn't know that. First country in the world to do that in 2016. But it's not been used because, you know, it's just the first time it's being legislated. So now the burden of proof is on consumers. And of course, good luck showing and bringing proof that Apple is doing plan obsolescence where, you know, they're trying to disguise it. But it has led to a number of suing. So now consumers have been suing brands because they can with this law.

And so I think at least in theory and if that law is being improved to make sure it has teeth, companies are going to think twice before. you know, engaging in practices of planned obsolescence. And I mean, I give you another example I quite like. In Sweden, it's forbidden since the 90s to do advertising targeting children under 12, just simple because they were like, okay, well, children. Yeah. That's common sense to me. Common sense.

Why is it the only country in the world to have done so? I don't know. That's the thing. Like, there are hundreds. I'm actually gathering for a new book, a thousand of these nice little, or initiative that are existing in the world, that if we were to put together, we would get ourselves the perfect cocktail for a socially just and ecologically effective transition. I love that idea. I mean, I've been often in my public talks, I've said the worst invention

of the human species is advertising and marketing. I mean, imagine a world without it, seriously. So let me ask you a couple other constraints based on your optimistic vision of de-growth. Number one is if we look at a budget, an energy and material budget for, say, France, and you said earlier that France has more than enough energy and resources so that everyone can have a quality life with well-being. It's just the distribution is the problem. But then also you said that we have to have a global distribution to the global south. So where does the democracy find the approach?

appropriate level for the citizens of France, but then include things like what's happening in Sri Lanka or other disadvantaged nations. Then do we take further haircuts of the people in France so that other people in other countries? And then where do we even draw the line there to other generations or even other species? I just don't see how that unfolds. Do you have any speculation on that? Yeah. I mean, we're already doing it through the United Nations with the COP climate conferences. We agreed on it. The scientists, the IPC, gives us a budget.

Countries agreed on it. Then they each add to somehow design a plan to be how I'm going to fit with that budget. And of course, in designing the budget, in theory, and then of course I'm going to tell you why it didn't work. Then the Global South was here defending their interests, being guys, you know, stabilizing emissions is just not enough. We need you to go like twice as fast because we need more emissions now.

And so in theory, we have the forum, we have the protocol, we've been doing this for several decades. Of course, there's a lot of interest running against this. But it's just a matter of doing the very same thing, not only for climate change, but for other global issues. So if we're to do this, then it's just the same thing. It's always the very messy process of democracy. The same thing when you're living with a few people and you're deciding, you know, who's going to clean the kitchen. That's the same. Except it's just with countries.

And if we want these countries' supranational discussions to be democratic, we also need to make sure that we have these democratic pockets within countries so that real interest of these people can just spring up. And so these people don't come to only represent the interest of the powerful, which are usually the industries that manage to lobby the government, into doing what we've been doing during these negotiations, each say, okay, we're going to cut that. And then you aggregate all the cut and you realize, well, that's not enough.

That's so far from enough. I think we're going to see a small but important real world example of this in the coming months and years in Europe, where the pigs or the south in Europe, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, especially with higher energy prices and what's happening with Russia and Ukraine, aren't going to fit all the EU standards to keep their debt to GDP guaranteed and being guaranteed. and being purchased by the ECB. And so are the Northern European countries going to willingly reduce their own living standards in order to support the Southern European peripheral countries? I don't know the answer to that.

But I think the G20, I think the leaders of the world cannot have the conversation that you and I are having because of loss aversion and the ubiquitous. this negative biological response humans have to less. And I agree with you that we can live happier lives with considerably less resources, especially those of us with resources living in the global north. But I don't think we're going to voluntarily choose that. And I think the biggest constraint that I can intellectually see in a smooth path to what you're proposing is the fact that in order to avoid a degrowth scenario, we are continually

changing the rules and going to more and more debt. We're doubling our financial claims on reality globally every eight and a half years. And all those financial claims are someone or some country or some institution actually has a mental belief that they have access to a certain amount of future resources and it's a musical chairs situation. So I think degrowth will happen and it will be how our international community responds to this financial haircut that is imposed upon us in the coming decade. My hope is that the work that you and others in the degrowth movement are doing can meet the future halfway and have these thousand ideas of the shared washing machines and the no

advertising to kids under 12 and all the other things you're working on already starting to bleed into economies so people have a foothold in a different cultural path. Do you have any comments to that as kind of a big statement? Yeah. I mean, the idea of if it were the case as rich countries having to willingly decide to lower their standards of living, that would be a very difficult, you know, sacrifice they will have to undergo. And then I would be quite pessimist. But they don't because, as I said, like, they can produce and consume ware less while increasing their quality of life. So this calculus we've done for France is if you bring people in the room, representative of the French population, and you ask them, what do you need every day? And they're

going to make a list, you know, I need this and a house and a car and blah, blah, blah. Then you put money on that, right? And you estimate how it costs where they live. And then you aggregate for the entirety of the population. You get one number. This is kind of the minimum national income you need to satisfy needs. And you can compare this to the actual national income you have. The difference right now this year is 44%. So we have a financial surplus of 44%. So in theory, if money was equitably distributed throughout France, we could lose 44% of our national income and no one would miss anything they need. It's not surprising. What we realized is actually wealth is concentrated.

Environmental pressures are concentrated. So I think in high-income countries, we could rather easily, if we were to have this big democratic discussions about what we need and ways of organizing our lives better so we can be happier while producing and consuming less, even just doing this will manage to free a lot of room. And then if that's not enough, we get to the point you discussed. So once we've reduced 44% of the French monetary economy and all of these money, resources, energy becomes available to other countries. I mean, some of it absolutely being saved.

If we need to do more, then we can discuss. But what I find surprising is we're not even willing to go that first leg of the way. What I'm arguing right now is let's go the first leg of the journey and let's see. But then I want to play with another idea that anthropologist Jason Hickle have developed recently. Most of the resources, the energy and the materials we use, they're not mined extracted on national territory. We import them from the global south. So now for a very long time, economists have been just legitimating globalization and industrial trade using dubious theories that shows that somehow they benefit from that.

I mean, comes an energy crisis and you realize that regardless of the amount of money you have, that's not going to make it for that. Same for a food crisis. There's food scarcity. It's the one that can grow food that is rich, not the one that's got a lot of money. So what about the scenario where the global South actually just create coalition, like the African Union and regional coalition and decide, you know what? Now we're going to stop exporting our resources. We're going to use these resources for our own development.

And then we realize that they have the bargaining power. So I know that's just a naive thought experiment, but if we believe that somehow every economic activity is dependent on energy and material, if these is really the core source of value, then that makes these countries today very powerful for certain materials that they have. Well, energy and material is the core source of wealth, other than ecosystem, functioning ecosystems that are healthy and vibrant. Well, I really hope you can continue to expand thinking and examples on how we're going to have to live with less energy and materials.

I'm going to now, if it's okay with you, ask you some personal questions that I ask at the end of every interview to all my guests. So given everything that you've said, do you have any? specific suggestions for how individual people listening to this podcast in advanced economies today can prepare themselves and their communities for what I call the great simplification and what you refer to as degrowth. Inform yourself a few years back that will have been very difficult to find information on this. Now there's just plenty of good quality books, plenty of podcasts, your documentary, all these

wonderful sources that give you access to an information that was just not available before. And so that's first, like, get that information and then go in discussing it. So I want to hear to give, like, empower yourself to enter these discussions. Very often, you know, people when they meet you, they're like, oh, I'm not an economist, and I haven't read your 900 pages thesis. So I'm like, it doesn't matter, you know, I mean, if we, if any single discussion about the future of humanity is just among people that have a noble price in economics, which have so far just advocating, we keep doing what we're doing.

There's going to be a problem. So I think people, like, get some information and don't wait to have a PhD in something to have a conversation. If you feel there's something wrong and you want to get to the bottom of them, ask questions, get to know the people that work on that, get in touch with people. I've been doing that since the beginning of my studies when I want to know something. I just get to that person and ask in the most naive, candid manner. You know, let it be just the head of investment.

fund, a sociologist, or anyone, just go ask them directly. Don't go around, don't be around the bush. Ask what you want. Usually it works. So you are a recently minted PhD student. What recommendations do you have specifically for young humans who become aware of the energy environment and biophysical constraints to the current human situation? Maybe it's an emotional shock. So a lot of my colleagues, they suffer from echo anxiety. I mean, it's a pretty dismal job. I spend my days just reading reports about how the world is burning. So it's just after a while, that's terrifying. It gets more and more terrifying, but it's nothing compared to the terror of when you first become aware that there's something wrong. It's like the Matrix when Neo just sees, you know,

the human being uses batteries and he's like, wow. So don't do that alone. There are so many people now are doing this. So again, like get in touch, create a book club. Something as simple as that, something, a world that is not including in GDP, but just book clubs where you can discuss when you can support each other, when you can empower yourself as a group to get to learn more about these ideas that are terrifying and sometimes complicated. I'm friends with numerous psychologists and psychiatrists. And one of the universal things that they tell me is if you're anxious about some global issue, just talk to someone else about it. And even if neither of you or none of the people in the conversation have any answers, it's the mere fact of sharing

with another human your thoughts and your concerns and your anxiety and your hopes that it reduces the cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and it boost helper T cells, which are good for your immune system. So I agree with you that just conversations are a big help. So Tim, what do you care personally? What do you care most about in the world? Okay. Now, I'm going to surprise you because my answer is a bit silly. What I care most about in the world is footnotes. Okay. That did surprise me. Yeah. You were an other expression for that one. So the thing is, I'm a huge academic writing nerd. If I'm studying economics, climate change, all of that is not because I love it. It's because we need to do that. Otherwise, you know, there won't be a planet where we can

write nice text and everything. But that's to show that for me, I'm not doing this out of pleasure. If we were living in a world that is not burning, where everything is pretty much stabilized, I would not be an economist. I would be philosopher of science and I would study what happens in a text when you create a footnote. That kind of very, you know, you have nerdy books about this, the use of the coma, the use of the bracky. What happens when you? You do you. You know, you have a footnote. What happens when you put a bracket in a footnote? Inception style. It's a thought within a thought within a thought.

So these kind of very fun questions. So that's what I care about. That's the thing I don't care about. We are forced to care about inequality and poverty and the destruction of natural habitat because it's happening. And that's also another thing that's just like solving these problems will also allow us to concentrate on other things. Hopefully, you know, that's just a transition.

We focus a big time in dealing with that, and then I can just, you know, read books about I can make writing on my hammock in the park. So I appreciate and share your reverence for footnotes and science, which underpins them. I worry, though, that what actually is behind the footnotes is becoming increasingly watered down on the science itself and also increasingly less. paid attention to as polarization and other anxieties and worries for our population, Trump what 20, 30 years ago, would have been like really solid science. So do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, there's many things going on there.

At the very core level, the application or for-profit mentality to the world of science, So now science being drawn into so many just articles being produced. So we're applying the kind of logic of growth and the definition of performance to the way we do science. Again, that science has never been a bit quantity. It's always a bit quality. It's always concrete about answering problems. And then, of course, the financing of that science come to reflect certain problems. So geologists, they're going to be spending time trying to locate new oil fields more than they're going to be spending time.

I'm trying to find ways of closing them, of course, because the financing goes one way. And then, as you said, once you've produced the science, there's like a whole course of obstacles for that science to be listened to. I mean, look at the IPCC. I mean, it's their sixth report that took like eight years to write the last one. It's the biggest scientific enterprise in the history of our species. And even that, people will be like denying that. And yesterday, the New York Times did a survey that only 1% of Americans and 3% of Democrats

considered climate change the most important issue today. The number one was inflation followed by economy and like 26% or something like that. Wow. Yeah. So what are you personally, of all the issues that you mentioned and maybe some others, what are you personally most concerned about in the coming decade or so in our world? biodiversity. I mean, in studying the natural world, I think the amount of terror I've got facing a climate collapse

is nothing compared to how fearful I am towards a collapse of biodiversity. So a world without fish, without insect, without forest, without trees, without microorganisms in the soil. I mean, imagine all of that, there's no clue. We don't know how to create ecosystems. We don't know. We only know a small percentage of all the species that exist on Earth. We don't know how they work.

We don't even know they exist. But we know how to destroy them. But we have no clue what will happen, watch this is gone. I think the pandemic is showing us how violently nature we don't understand can bite back. And so, you know, the future viruses are just, you know, getting used to growing food, without pollinators, of realizing, you know, that the spread of diseases happens so much faster when some insect disappears. All of these kind of feedbacks, they terrify me.

This is why for me, like, as an ecological economist, I see nature as a very sophisticated economy of its own that has been developing for millions of years, even more. And we don't understand how the bumble bee can fly. We don't understand how bees organize. And so don't tell me we're going to just pollinate flowers with drones. No. I mean, that would be like such an inefficient and stupid way of going. Like the way of going would be to just protect the bees and let them do what they do best.

I share your fear for that. We will miss them when they're gone. And if you've followed my work at all, you know that the thing that I find most sacred in our world is the natural world and the species we share the planet with. And we just don't include them in our decisions. I think it's starting to change very, very slowly. So in contrast, Tim, what are you most hopeful about in the coming decade or so? Okay. This I love.

Perhaps you've heard about the different calls for desertion among French graduates. No, I have not. That has been this spring. Oh, that's fun. So big engineers, top engineer business schools, they graduate, and then on their graduation speech, they just denounce like, you know what, we won't participate in the massacre. We've been trained to build highways, to extract oil, but we won't do it. And we're inviting you to desert capitalism, to build that society we want

to apply our energy, or intelligence, or creative forces into building the society we want. And so in France, it's calls for desertion. I mean, in China, it was the lying flat movement, starting in June 21. Same kind of move. Like, we're just, our generation, there's no money you can give us that's going to make us destroy the world. Like, especially now that we know that, you know, money doesn't make you happy. What we want is meaning.

What we want is a feeling to improve the world. And when you think about it, that is just as a huge transformatri. transformational potential. If every single time you want to open an oil field or, you know, build a private jet, you cannot find an engineer that will do it because they'll just love at you and be like,

what, build a private jet? Do you think I've got only that to do? I'm just doing so, you know, and then you won't be able to do it. So this kind of like general strike, what's striking against capitalism is a story of transformation I rather like. I think there's parallels.

strike that's happening in China right now, which is people are not paying their mortgages because they don't believe in the system and they're having to pay for things that aren't even being built yet. And the whole property bubble is exploded. So I think there's a complexity risk associated with that. But I do actually agree with you that there will be emergent social responses like the one you're discussing that we can't even imagine yet that are going to play a role in our future. So, Timothy, if you were benevolent dictator, which is not a completely remote possibility one day, and there was no personal recourse to your decisions, what one thing would you do to improve human and planetary futures?

What one thing would you enact? I would eradicate extreme wealth. As simple as that, I would just take all the wealth we have and all its various forms, and I would just split it up equitably, not fully equally, but equitably in between people of the world. It's not going to solve all problems, but at least it will give us a fresh start where we all have an equal say. But wouldn't that everything else be an equal if we had the same rules and the same energy surplus, eventually just following a power log, get to the same place it was, other than the

fresh start part of it? I mean, I do hope that we've learned from the mistake of the past. I don't think there will be, you know, there's no miracles, no easy shots. We need to learn from the mistake we've made, and we need to make better decisions. But no one is going to do that for us. And, you know, there's nothing guarantee we succeed. And that's also good. We need to be aware that we can fail.

Because that means we are humble and we think twice about before taking an action. You are a bright, creative young human. I wish there were more people like you. Do you have any other closing thoughts, advice, wisdom for the listeners of this show? Thank you, Nate. I'm honored. If you've listened until now, I'm wishing you the best. And I hope our path cross all of you. Okay, Mwandami to be continued. Thank you. much for your time. Thank you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of the Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit thegreatsimplification.com

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