Today, Explained - Blame Capitalism: Degrowing pains

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Capitalism isn’t natural, was never inevitable, and endless growth is killing Earth. The final episode of “Blame Capitalism” examines the degrowth movement, whose proponents call to end capitalism as we know it. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Haleema Shah and Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman with original music by Jon Ehrens, and hosted by Noel King. Additional editorial support from Jolie Myers and Miranda Kennedy. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good news here, new figures show the economy is growing. China's latest quarterly growth figures are out and they're better than expected. Rwanda is the third fastest growing economy in the world. The India growth story is alive and kicking. We can have all the things we enjoy today, but we don't know where this growth goes. And if it doesn't stop, it will cause a strain. The capitalist, capital P, philosophy is underpinned by a really simple assumption. Growth is good. But what if it isn't?

You've got a finite planet. It has certain limits. You should listen to those limits. Coming up on Today Explained, blame capitalism. We're going to talk degrowth. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about Bet MGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM

is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. On Fridays this month, we've been examining how and why so many Americans have turned on capitalism. 24-year-old Adrian Lodis is one of those people. Adrian is a former EMT and a current communist. Why do you hate capitalism?

I mean, where do I start? I think that the big thing that got me because I was an EMT is just the explicit profits over people part. And I saw that firsthand as a healthcare provider of, we're the ones on the truck, yet I was only making $14.50 an hour while they made billions in profit. And I think that that really just got me of like, we see me as being unskilled even though I'm the one doing the actual labor.

Yet we see the people at the top as very, very skilled. Oh, also environmental justice, just because, you know, putting profits over the climate and all of that just really gets to me. Rarely as a reporter do you get it all in one answer. But there it was in the first interview I did for this series, all in one answer. But there it was in the first interview I did for this series, all in one answer. Inequality, bad wages, and what we've done to the environment on our way to economic growth. And it is not just the young communists talking this way. You remember Wendy Carlin from our first episode, PhD, CBE, super smart professor of economics. Wendy traced for us the capitalist arc from Adam Smith's invisible hand liberalism to Keynesianism, where the government's hands are massaging problems away. I asked Wendy, what is the ism in 2023? Where do we stand?

Well, the thing really is we need a new ism because we have new problems. Each of the isms kind of emerges to deal with the problems of the preceding one. So now we have problems of inequality, of climate crisis, and we need to have a livable planet. And that's got to be put together into a coherent economic system if we're going to meet those challenges. A new ism. You heard me gasp. But what would that mean? Well, one possibility is not a word that ends with ism. I wish it were for consistency, but no, it's called degrowth. And it means stop trying to grow economies, to grow GDP. Degrowth is controversial and for good reason. Growth is good. I lived for a long time in African countries that were experiencing GDP growth. I saw highways being built and towers being erected and roads being paved.

To this day, scaffolding and rebar make me so happy. It means things are growing. I knew people in Sudan and Rwanda who'd had to leave school at 9 or 10 years old. But thanks to economic growth, they were sending their kids to college. Not for nothing that growth is a key tenet of capitalism. But growth can be very unequal, and it can absolutely trash the planet. What we're doing currently is being passengers on a train racing towards the cliff. Economic historian Dirk Philipsen is a proponent of degrowth. Degrowth is a not particularly well-defined term that combines a number of people who

have all come to the conclusion, based on very, very solid evidence by now, that we can no longer grow and yet live in a world in which literally every government on earth currently pursues a strategy of growth. The degrowth movement says this is a suicide pact. Dirk teaches public policy at Duke. He wrote a book called The Little Big Number, how GDP came to rule the world and what to do about it. GDP is gross domestic product, and it's the sum total of all of the goods and services produced in a country in a single year. Everything.

So how did it come to rule the world? Effectively, it came out of the Great Depression when capitalist economies around the world collapsed and nobody quite understood why that was happening. In 1929, we had a crash. And in 1934, Congress asked economists what happened. They began to realize that they really didn't have a whole lot of knowledge about what the economy actually is and what it entails.

And for the first time, we counted. And we came up with what is now known as GDP or gross domestic product. And so GDP is essentially now a metric that measures quite accurately output of an economy. The problem with that immediately, the minute you begin to think about it, is that it is just simply volume and volume only expressed in money. So anything and everything that particularly women do, for instance, in the care economy, that is not sold in the marketplace is not counted. By 10.30, Delfina has breastfed the baby,

dressed the children, made three beds, tidied two bedrooms, prepared breakfast for four, done the washing up, cleaned the bathroom, finished one load of washing, and mixed the powder paint as her contribution to the activities of community play school. Whether almost all of the proceeds go to rich people and nothing is left for poor people is not measured. Whether the things that we sell in the marketplace are good or bad,

toys or weapons, is not differentiated. It counts war. It counts environmental degradation. It counts pornography. It counts cigarette advertising. Things that many societies may view as unhealthy and perhaps slightly toxic. This is a profoundly misleading and ultimately stupid and dangerous metric. We are in desperate, dire need to find much better metrics, much better guidelines for what we do in our respective national economies. We need to figure out how to build economies that allow us to thrive without having to grow.

Where did the degrowth movement start? Well, that depends on how you want to slice that particular cake. It has multiple origin points, I think, that are important. One is certainly the 1960s and early 70s. Chief among them, a report by an organization called the Club of Rome that is probably to this very day a text on economics that has been read by more people than any other, and that is called The Limits to Growth. As we grow richer, there is rising concern about pollution, our ability to feed a growing population, and fears that we may run out of fuel and metals.

The world is in a completely unstable situation and is likely to fall to pieces if it doesn't stop growing. Because of the high population levels and the increasing industrialization, natural resources are depleted at an increasing rate, and finally they fall down to the point where the industrial system can no longer be sustained. So it goes from a bunch of nerds in a room in the early 70s writing a report, and now it's 2023, and I'm seeing this language in so many places. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

Environmental activists are talking about degrowth. Economists are talking about degrowth. There's new books about degrowth. I've seen in the big newspapers, the New York Times, the New Yorker, essays, op-eds, wondering if it's possible. Can you trace the arc for me? Yeah, so this is essentially happening at the same time as the environmental movement is coming up. You have a river catching on fire because of all the pollutants and the trash that is in the river. The Cuyahoga River, as it reaches Lake Erie, is an exhausted stream, abused and misused by man and his machines. You have a full-scale picture of planet Earth called the Blue Marble. No one, after seeing that, could deny that the world is finite.

This really changed people's understanding as to what we need to do in order to take care of this planet. And vitally important also for the establishment of an environmental movement in which they used computers to show for the first time that if we grow exponentially, we will simply run out of resources and destroy the planet. It also comes out of multiple political movements that were against societies turning into consumer societies where nothing matters any more than producing and consuming. If you have a kind of society which is going to eat the very planet we're on, eat it up, consume it,

you will find that there's nothing left. And so lots and lots of different things come together that create a receptive audience for the limits to growth. They're essentially making the argument that if we stay on this growth path, the only end to that is, you know, our own extinction. One more thing I want to say about the degrowth community is that they are not just saying it's not possible. They're also saying it's not desirable. It's a kind of life that you and I ultimately do not want. We don't want to drown in just stuff. We want to have a life.

We want to have time for each other. We want to have time for creative thinking and art and love and kindness. You teach at Duke. You understand American politics. I think an American politician could not win on a platform of degrowth. I beg to differ. Tell me. Tell me more.

The only famous politician in the Western world, to my knowledge, who ever made it a platform to replace GDP and to try to begin to develop an economy that does not need to grow with Robert F. Kennedy. Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. In that speech in 1968, he talked about it very, very eloquently, saying that just the way we measure success right now... It measures everything in short. Measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud that we are Americans.

He had very deeply thought about it. He was very smart about it. And from what I know about this history, he was likely to be not just the Democratic candidate, but also likely to be the next president of the United States. This is a message that needs to be told. It's a difficult message because it runs up against very deeply ingrained assumptions that people have. But I think it is increasingly a message that resonates with a growing number of people, and particularly young people I work with.

I don't even have to explain it anymore. When I started working on this, I would imagine that worldwide there was maybe a community of 500 to 1,000 people who were working on this. Now there are hundreds of thousands of people. People are beginning to understand this is the critical issue. This is the most important critical issue of all times. That was Duke University's Dirk Philipson. Coming up next, wait, could a politician win on a platform of degrowth? What would the platform be? Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple.

In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply.

Back with Today Explained, Blame Capitalism. Over the course of our series, we've heard critiques of shareholder capitalism, of laissez-faire capitalism, of entire ages that masquerade as golden, comma, capitalism, but exclude a lot of people. But there's an argument that it's not the modifiers. The problem is just capitalism. The overriding misconception in capitalism is that it has no idea where enough is, that sort of point of balance between having too little and having too much. And even if it did recognize that point, it has no way of stopping when it gets there because it's too busy growing. Tim Jackson is an ecological economist. I lead a research center called the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable

Prosperity. We started this series on capitalism by noting that everyone seems deeply disappointed in it these days. And we say everyone, I'm exaggerating, right? But more and more, you hear people out in the public square saying capitalism is not working. Why do you think that is? Where do you think this discontent has come from in the past decade or so? Well, it's come from the fact that the inequality that capitalism has given rise to has become more and more obvious. Also, I think we can look back at the financial crisis, see that as a crisis of capitalism, a point at which the most capitalistic institutions, the banks and the financial institutions, basically fell apart because they had behaved

too recklessly and then had to be bailed out, essentially, by the taxpayer. If there's one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans and everybody in between, it's that we all hated the bank bailout. And then there are sort of longer term trends, this sort of rise in inequality because of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few. And that's, I think, interestingly given rise to dissatisfaction even among capitalists. Mark Benioff, who was the CEO, chief executive of Salesforce at the time, went to the World Economic Forum in January

of 2020, basically saying capitalism is dead. Capitalism, as we have known it, is dead. And this obsession that we have with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency. And that was an extraordinary thing, really, for somebody who had become a billionaire through capitalism and lived in one of the most capitalist countries and presided over one of the most capitalist companies to start saying, actually, you know, we have to think a little bit differently about what we're doing here because this kind of capitalism at least doesn't work but what I really took from that conversation and from this dissatisfaction with capitalism is that actually we should be thinking about capitalism as a temporary phase

in history all phases in history are temporary we know that everything changes no social system lasts forever and actually I think that's a very good basis for starting to think about what might happen after capitalism. What might happen after capitalism? You're asking me to answer that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is a huge question. It is a huge question. And here's where the degrowth movement can run into trouble.

What are its policies? A degrowth lawmaker would run on what exactly? Some of the books about degrowth offer ideas, like legislate an end to planned obsolescence. My iPhone and millions of other iPhones could last 10 or 15 years if Apple built them that way. Apple has settled a class action suit after being accused of purposely slowing down older phones during upgrades. Another idea, cut advertising on TV and on billboards so that people don't buy a bunch of stuff they don't need.

They're everywhere you look and now they're looking at you too. Digital billboards with the ability to track your every move. Or shift from ownership to usership. It's called Avail and it's basically like Airbnb for your car. It puts unused vehicles like these on the road and money in owner's pockets. And a controversial idea for Americans, legislate that the emissions spewing beef industry has to shrink. In digesting their high fiber diet, cows emit methane as a byproduct,

making them one of the least climate friendly sources of food on the planet. I actually stopped eating meat after reading a couple of these compelling degrowth books. But there's the problem. A lot of these solutions come down to individual behavior. Would companies agree to this stuff? The way things are set up now, the purpose of a corporation, you remember, is to make money for its shareholders. Could that really change? Tim Jackson is surprisingly optimistic about this. The transition we're talking about takes the fundamental bits of economics and asks what should they really mean. So is investment, for example, an endless wealth maximization process that makes a few people very rich at

the expense of the majority? No, that's not what investment means in economics. Investment means taking some of our income from the present, putting it aside in order to construct a better future. It's about seeing the future and investing in that future. Investment as a commitment to the future. Same thing with enterprise. It's there to serve society. And if you begin to think about the services that enterprises provide to society, you organize them in different ways. You pay for them in different ways.

They self-organize in different ways and they deliver different things to society. And so essentially, it does make it sound like a rather complicated exercise. And I think we should not expect it to be simple, because we are embedded in this complex culture, and it's been with us for a couple of centuries. And it's embedded in our politics, it's embedded in our psyche, it's embedded in our organization of society, and it's embedded in our economics. I mean, we've all learned, and I think accurately, that GDP growth has helped humanity in the developed world.

It has helped us become the developed world. Shouldn't we be pursuing that for the parts of the world that are underdeveloped, that don't have what we have? I think that's a really, really important part of the conversation. It's a really important observation. You don't, I think, want a system in which you rule out the possibilities of growth in those poorer parts of the world. That growth is at the moment in hock to the rich economies, in debt to the rich economies,

organized under systems that are dominated by the rich economies. And there's nobody in the rich economies really taking that problem seriously. Nobody saying actually, you know, we can't afford to grow here anymore because there is a desperate need for growth to bring poor people out of poverty. And that's a, you know, that's a wicked problem. It's a problem that calls on us to be politically astute, courageous as leaders, inventive as entrepreneurs, and sometimes simply moral as human beings. Human beings are not short-term, selfish, hedonistic consumers, or at least that's not our entirety. And we're losing the depth of our own humanity by living inside a system that pretends that we are those individuals, and that creates all its institutional arrangements to confine us in what I see actually as a kind of a cage. I see capitalism as a cage that confines us into

an image of ourselves that I don't personally believe in. And if I look to poets or sages or psychologists or sociologists, I don't see that they believe in it either. The only people who do seem to believe in it are economists. Economist Tim Jackson. Everyone's talking about capitalism and they all seem like they're mad. That's where we started this series. We asked, what is capitalism? It's an economic system of private property, markets and companies. An anodyne definition for a thing that's anything but. We also asked, can we change it?

Should we try? Well, people have changed it. It's a powerful system, but as we've learned, it's not natural. It was never inevitable. And while maybe the most potent thing ever said about capitalism was Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher's remark

that there is no alternative, today, a lot of people burned by the system or excluded from its successes, are asking, but what if there is? Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy. We had original music from John Ahrens, and our editor is Matthew Collette. We had additional editing from Jolie Myers and Miranda Kennedy. Halima Shah and Laura Bullard were our fact-checkers, Thank you. Rest of the team here at Today Explained include Siona Petros, Miles Bryan, Hadi Mouagdi, Patrick Boyd, Rob Byers, Amina El-Sadi, Victoria Chamberlain, and Amanda Llewellyn. My co-host is Sean Ramosfirm. And if you're having strong feelings about degrowth, please do email them to Sean.

He's at seanramosfirm underscore two at gmail.com. We're produced by the Vox Media Podcast Network and distributed to public radio stations by WNYC in New York City. If you like the show, here's an idea. Rate us and give us a review on Apple Podcasts. It'll help other people find the show. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.