Upstream - Slow Down or Die w/ Timothée Parrique

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

In this episode, Timothée Parrique joins us for a discussion on degrowth. We begin the conversation with explaining the concept of degrowth, looking at its history, and really unpacking what it is and what it isn’t. We talk about degrowth’s two-fold agenda to both downscale production and consumption for environmental reasons, as well as its potential for removing the profit-motive as a central concern in how we organize society. We outline the differences between degrowth and recessions, the problem with GDP as a measurement tool for success, how degrowth can help to reduce poverty in certain contexts, the benefits of a dynamic steady state economy, where the degrowth movement is today, and much more.  Timothée Parrique is an economist originally from Versailles, France. He is currently a researcher at HEC Lausanne – The Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He works on macro-ecological planning in Switzerland as part of the STRIVE research project. He's also the author of Slow Down or Die: The Economics of Degrowth.  Further resources: Timothée Parrique Slow Down or Die: The Economics of Degrowth, by Timothée Parrique The Limits to Growth Related episodes: How Degrowth Will Save the World with Jason Hickel Doughnut Economics with Kate Raworth Better Lives for All w/ Jason Hickel Buen Vivir with Eduardo Gudynas A World Without Profit with Jennifer Hinton Documentary #8: Worker Cooperatives Pt. 1 – Widening Spheres of Democracy Documentary #8: Worker Cooperatives Pt. 2 – Islands within a Sea of Capitalism Life Beyond the Clock with Jenny Odell Intermission music: "Atlas" by Muma Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you’ll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Every time I would pronounce degrowth, you know, you would see them like hissing, like a pack of velociraptors, you know, like ready to battle. I was like, what is that guy saying? You know, it disturbs me. Like, many people have come to me after my thesis was published, and they were like, it looks solid and I've not managed to demonstrate that you're wrong, but I want to. See, there's an emotional response, and that's good, because a critical concept is here to criticize.

It's here to somehow unveil an aspect of a reality that we've been normalizing. And I think the pursuit of economic growth, at different levels, at the individual level, at the level of a country, of course, that want to increase the GDP, at the level of a company of a business that always wants to increase its profit. These kind of ideology of growth we've been normalizing over the last decades. And so the concept of degrowth, I think, came at the right time to problematize this. You're listening to Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you've thought, you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Endless growth is not only impossible on a finite planet, but it's antagonistic to human and planetary health and well-being. Of course, some economic growth may be needed globally, particularly in global South states,

which have been chronically and criminally underdeveloped by the West. But for the majority of the global North, degrowth is not just desirable. It's a necessity, and in fact, according to today's guest, we must slow down or die. Today we'll be joined by Timote Parique, an economist originally from Versailles, France. He's currently a researcher at the H.E.C. Lausanne, the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland. He works on macro-ecological planning in Switzerland as part of the Strive Research Project. He's also author of Slow Down or Die, The Economics of Degrowth, Translated by Claire Benoit.

And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project go. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund,

so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Della, in conversation with Timote Parique. Welcome to Upstream. We like starting with our guests introducing themselves. So would you mind introducing yourself for us today? Hello. My name is Timothy Parique. I'm a French economist currently working at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. And I wrote my PhD in between Sweden and France on the idea of degrowth. So that was, It was almost 10 years ago, 2016, and ever since, I've been exploring the mysteries of ecological economics and especially around issues of growth, post-growth, and de-growth. Wonderful.

And because I know de-growth is originally a French term, can you tell us how to say de-growth in French? Oh, yeah, that's good. A little tutorial. So we said de-croscence. decroissance. So, croissance is growth, and you had the de-de-de-croissance. So if you want to sound particularly cool during a dinner, you can speak about French decroissance. And actually, when the term was invented back in 2002, it was decroissance, sullenable and convivial. So sustainable and convivial de-growth. And I think these adjectives that were

added to the concept at first, really show that that particular idea was crafted in a very specific manner. I mean, that was 20 years ago. Back then, it was just a slogan. Actually, it was in tiny magazine. It's not in a big newspaper, not in a book, not in a scientific article. It was just a special issue in a very small environmental magazine where five people decided to use the concept.

of de croissants for the first time. Not to be confused with de croissant. That would be something else. Well, thank you for that. And I, yeah, I was thinking about, because we've had Jason Hickle in the show to talk about degrowth, you know, what would be a new angle that we could take for this? And so the history that you just brought in

is something I'd love to focus on and weave in. And then the other piece are myths. Your book really goes into some of the, you know, the myths and the misunderstanding. things. So even just clarifying that it wasn't just degrowth, that it was convivial and sustainable degrowth, that kind of plays to that. So let's start with growth, because degrowth is in relation to growth. So tell us the problem with growth in your understanding and your view. So the first problem I can think of is that it's ecologically unsustainable. I think objection to growth,

So in what we call the growth critical scholarship, we divide between the critique. So when we talk about objection to growth, that all the kind of worries we can have about economic growth, the way we can criticize that phenomenon, it can be social, political, environmental. So this kind of environmental objection to growth consists in saying that today in most countries in the world, most high-income countries in the world, we are in a state of ecological unsustainability, meaning our footprint is higher than the biocabacity of our ecosystems. Now, we know that this is a problem, and so we're trying to do something about it. Ecological economists, they comment at this point on the what to do about it.

And I think there's a huge debate between green growth and degrowth and degrowthers. they've been arguing that growth is making that problem more complicated. The problem being that you want to lower your footprint and one of the most fastest and most certain way of using less resources is producing and consuming less. Of course, you have other ways of doing that, developing eco-innovation, new ways of organizing the economy, but one, let's say, one of the safest way

of doing it is just to avoid producing and consumption because the most renewable resource is the one you can afford not using. So I think degrowth, mostly in the 2000s, emerged as some kind of alternative solution to the climate and ecological crisis. But we can add other problems with growth. I mean, when you think of growth, most people that will imagine that that's progress. It's kind of a quality of life. Or maybe you will imagine you get more money in your bank account every month and you can spend it on new product and then that make you happier. But that's not what economic growth is. Economic growth is just the increase of growth domestic product, which is an indicator of monetary activity. And behind that aggregated phenomenon,

you can have very different qualities of economic growth. What is certain and regardless, Regardless of the quality, you will have a biophysical consequence. So that's something I've been demonstrating. My PhD thesis is that you cannot fully decouple economic growth from environmental pressures. But then on the social side, you can have more desirable forms of economic growth than others, and you can even get what Herman Daly, the American ecological economists, call anti-economic growth.

meaning like an additional economic activity that is actually lowering quality of life rather than increasing it. And so if you put these together, you can build up an additive critique of economic growth, which I do in my thesis now have mentioned too, but you can actually have more steps in the stairway of critique,

showing that growth is not only ecologically insensitive, sustainable, also socially untenable because as I'm trying to show in the book using the framework of feminist economics, that economic growth, that's additional economic activity you're witnessing, is not coming from nowhere, it requires working time. Working time not only in the factory, but also outside of it. And when you take time from people, since the day it's only 24 hours, they cannot use it for something else. And so as people dedicate more and more time to growth, meaning they invest more and more in their time in producing monetary commodities,

they use less of their time to do something else outside of the economy. And after some point that can become a problem, if, for example, you completely lose your ability to politically organize. So that's one argument I think that is even more vivid today in 2025 than it was 10 years ago the fact that we're witnessing in many countries in the world a degradation in a democratic activity or democracies seems not as good as they used to be and I think we've tend to forgot and that's that the economist's perception of that problem is that to run a political system that you want to be democratic you need to

people to be available to inform themselves, to educate themselves, to debate, to vote, to participate in these activities. And if we're all too busy having two jobs producing communities on the market, then we are not available for that kind of horizontal, participatory, deliberative democracy. Yeah. And so, yeah, growth is unsustainable. That's very clear. And as you go through the history, you know, we've known this for a long time now. And I love how you trace the critiques of growth and then going into something that's an alternative. And one of the ways that you talked about growth, which I appreciated a lot, was snowflakes in a globe. Can you, do you remember that? And can you tell us the difference between adding more

snowflakes to the globe or shaking a globe? I'm so happy you're mentioning this analogy, and I think you're the first one ever. You know, when you're making analogies and writing a book, You accept that some analogies are going to work and other are going to fail. And I thought that that one failed because no one ever mentioned it. So I am actually very happy right now. So I will gladly explain what I meant with this no global analogy. So economic growth, what I wanted to show, because I've said that it's an increase in economic activity that we measure through gross domestic product. gross domestic product is basically the addition of all added value during a period of time.

So it's counting basically the stuff we buy and sell on markets. And so that gives you at least two types of growth. One that is just about buying and selling more of the stuff that already exist in the market. Let's say instead of drinking one coffee per day, you drink three coffees per day, you know. So you will have to extract more coffee beans and make more coffee and move more stuff around. You would see growth of the stuff we're already doing. But you can also create new commodities, which would widen the size of your economy. So let's say 10 years ago and whenever that was when Airbnb was invented,

that created a new commodity. Now when you're going away on the weekend camping, you can rent your importment to someone, which will create a monetary transaction that will be recorded in national accounting as an economic activity. Your apartment existed before. I was just the same. You could have, you know, lend it to a friend. You know, so you could say, like, nothing has been created, and yet somehow this is economic

growth. So, in my analogy, you know, you can add flakes in the globe that's kind of adding new commodities, or you can just like shake it harder. And what GDP measures is the movement of the flakes, in the sense of the movement of the currency you have in your economy that is just moving hands. And I'm using this analogy to build up then a more specific than definition of degrowth to show that degrowth as a two-fold agenda, one of kind of downskilling production and consumption for environmental reasons. So if we take the example of coffee

and if we identify coffee as a high footprint good that we want to reduce, then that will be just producing and consuming less coffee. But there is also these decommodifying aspect of the strategy.

For example, looking at specific services that you could say are overly commodified. I'm thinking instinctively about the health care sectors in certain countries that have been the target of, you know, productory for-profit capture for many years and now you end up with absolutely, you know, out-of-reach very expensive medicine. And you realize that perhaps in a world where this, you know, sector, let's say health, was run as a not-for-profit sector, either not-for-profit, you know, through not-for-profit cooperatives or through a public service,

perhaps, you know, there will be less monetary interaction in volumes because it will be cheaper. So in terms of economic growth, you know, they'll be like, oh, GDP will go down. You know, if you take the American healthcare sector and you decommodify it so you get, you know, the Swedish or the French healthcare sector, then you, let's say, you destroy a huge chunk of GDP. but you've not destroyed any value because health care is more accessible and you actually increase, you know, one aspect of quality of life,

which is maybe life expectancy or just health standards in general. So you see this little thought experiment that shows us that weirdly in some situation, economic growth can degrade quality of life, and in the opposite, some forms of degrowth can improve well-being. Absolutely. And yeah, I really liked the metaphor. Because, yeah, this idea of adding flakes to the globe is making something commodified or creating a new monetary transaction. We've, on this show, really looked at the ways that capitalism continues to look for frontiers, new markets, new things to commodify, right?

So that really illustrated that point. And then the second, the shaking the snow globe more vigorously, the example you gave is, instead of changing phones every 10 years, planned obsolescence would force us to change our phones. every two years, right? That's that shaking it more vigorously, the like more turnaround, you know, fast fashion comes to mind. So just all the ways that capitalism's addiction to growth, necessity of growth, is actually just, yeah, hurting us and the planet in these very great illustrated ways. And when I think about it, like, people's common idea of economic progress is probably, you know, when you're thinking with your phone, like, if I were to tell you, like, your phone, you know, you will change it more and more often, like it will

break down more and more often, which is in the interest, if you've seen, of the for-profit corporation that is selling the phone, because that company wants to see its profit rising. And so we'll just go into many strategies to do that. And one of them is this kind of volume growth of trying to just sell more and more. that's for me the very opposite of progress. And so here we are in this kind of paradox of maximizing GDP is actually degrading, not quality, one very small aspect of quality of life, but let's say, you know, the kind of quality you derive from a product.

And before, you know, people tell me, yeah, but it's a phone, you know, technology is going so fast, So it's good. Maybe if we buy a new one every six months, think about your dishwasher, like, and how much that technology has been evolving in the last decades. Like, find me one person that has been happy when their dishwasher or their laundry machine broke down.

And they were like, so cool, I'm going to buy a new one and see what kind of new technology is out in the world of laundry machine. No, that person was annoyed. I was like, God damn it. And so here we realize that making durable, modular, product that you can fix yourself is poison to capitalism because it's just cutting an opportunity for a corporation to profit. And so therefore, it is removing an opportunity for the investors

of that corporation to get a return on their investment and to use a very, very Marxist reading of that economy to just, you know, make money out of just owning money. And so I think from the very beginning when degrowth emerged in 2000, and I think what made that concept so interesting in the beginning is that it was some kind of critical cocktail where, you know, there was a bit of Marxist critique of how capitalism exploits labor and forces workers to have to sell their time just to buy a new laundry machine that has gotten more expensive just because the last one broke

because of planned obsolescence or just buy. all the stuff you see on ads because companies actually just spend a lot of money to manufacture your desire towards wanting to buy their product. But also critique of extractivism, environmentalist, kind of criticizing not only capitalism, but productivist economies in general for overusing natural resources, feminist critiques that we're also adding that capitalism is not on the exploiting people in factories that receive a wage, but also all the people, mostly women, that support these workers around.

And so therefore it is kind of a total system of exploitation. So degrowth became some kind of a new critical champion term. And its strength, and I'll finish on that, is that it's so ugly as a term. You know, and ugly in the sense of disturbing, you know, When I debate economist, I did my PSU as financed by the European Commission, so I would often go there and debate with the European Commission economist, which are as close as, you know, Dark Vader's Valley.

You know, there's people that believe so much in growth, you know, so much in their intellectual DNA that every time I would pronounce degrowth, you know, you would see them like hissing, like a pack of velociraptors, you know, like ready to battle. I was like, what is that guy saying? you know, it disturbs me. Like, many people have come to me after my thesis was published, and they were like, it looks solid,

and I've not managed to demonstrate that you're wrong, but I want to. Like, it must be wrong. Whatever you say, like, it's outrageous, and I will spend as much effort as I can to show that it's wrong. So there's an emotional response, and that's good, because a critical concept is here to criticize. It's here to somehow unveil an aspect of a reality that we've been normalizing.

And I think the pursuit of economic growth at different levels, at the individual level, the fact that, you know, we want to be richer and richer in money, at the level of a country, of course, that's want to increase the GDP, at the level of a company,

of a business that always wants to increase its profit, these kind of ideology of growth we've been normalizing over the last decades. And so this, the concept of degrowth, I think, came at the right time to problematize this. Yes. And I do love how you articulate how the growth imperative, growth addiction has really impacted us on all these levels, the individual, the company or organization level, and then as well, this societal, this economy level. And it's really what this growth imperative has us do, right? Has this do as an economy, has us do as a business, has this do as an individual. And another great way that you illustrate this, a quote from your book. would we lend our friend's money with predatory interest rates? Would we devise ad campaigns to pressure our beloved ones to buy products they do not need?

Would we decide to lay off a friend because someone on the other side of the planet could work for less? No, obviously not. If the cobalt mine were in my backyard and my children worked in it, would I think twice before upgrading my phone. So I just love that. like these are the things that capitalism and the imperative of growth would have us do and have have people do all the time. And so that way of personalizing it really shifts it for us. So one thing that I found very helpful that you clarify that I think would be really good to clarify right now is what is the difference between degrowth and recession?

Because that might be some where the fear comes. Recessions or contraction of the economy, people have felt that, you know, 2008, more recently as well, it hurts. So break that down for us and maybe a little bit of introduction as to what degrowth is. I don't think we've done that yet either. Absolutely. So in economics, a recession is just a period of time where GDP decreases. And that's a bad word in the sense of we often associate a recession with an employment, with a drop in purchasing power,

especially for poorest households. We associate this with businesses going bust. We associate this with austerity, politics, and states, reducing budgets at school, at university. That's all the things that are bundled around the term recession. And so from a communication perspective, we understand that back in 2002, when people were talking with degrowth,

one of the first thing they said was just like, well, degrowth is not just like a normal recession. And so there's been a lot of effort trying to differentiate the two. First, I mean, if they were economists listening, yes, degrowth is a kind of recession. What they have in common is the contraction of economic activity. If you measure it with GDP, I don't think that's the most interesting measure. but, I mean, since de-growth is a downskilling of production and consumption, it would be weird if you were not to call it, you know, you can call it a contraction, you can call it a slowdown, you can call it down-skilling. It is a kind of recession. But it has several differences with the recession. First, it is planned in the sense of it doesn't happen by accident. In economics, we often say, you know, it's an exogenous shock, something coming from outside. So, let's let's say you get a pandemic, COVID is coming, and then you cannot go to work

and that contract your economic activity. It's not like you've decided to launch a worldwide pandemic. Or you get a war coming out. Or you get a financial crisis out of nowhere, and that also going to happen. It's like an economic accident. Degrowth, the first difference is that you would plan it in the sense of it's an intentional recession.

So that's already makes it a bit special. because not every day you hear politicians that have plans to slow down the economy. And we've seen in the previous discussion that it's something you do because of social and ecological reasons. What I've shown in my work basically is just either you can find a way through technology, through efficiency, through eco-innovation, to get back within planetary boundaries without producing and consuming less. That's the idea of green growth. If you can do this, then yeah, okay, sure.

Maybe you don't have to de-grow, at least for environmental reasons. But if you cannot do this, and so far no country in the world has shown that this is practically possible and no economists has shown that is even theoretically possible, then you have to go through that period of time where production and consumption will be reduced to the point of that allows you to get back within planetary boundaries. And so that's the contraction aspect of de-growth.

So one difference is on the planning, on the why you're doing it. And then there are several challenges in the sense of, in the same way that when you have a recession, governments, communities, they can react in different ways. And so you can have recessions that have a very problematic impact that it puts people out of a job, and then these people, they fall into poverty with all the negative consequences that this has. So one of the task that has been given to economists working on degrowth in the last decades is basically this question, how can you contract an economy without crashing it? If you need to slow down an economy, what would be the smart way of doing this as to minimize unemployment, as to minimize austerity in public budget, as to minimize businesses going bankrupt? And from all that work that we've been doing, you realize that, again, because growth and

degrowth, they're very aggregated macroeconomic phenomenon. Then we can, in theory, imagine a temporary slowdown of an economy for me, in the case of France, that the one I had in mind when I wrote Slow Down or Die, that does not lead to an increase in unemployment, that does not put a strain on public expenses. that does not, you know, increase levels of poverty. And again, you can demonstrate this. You can demonstrate that you can have a smaller economy with less poor people in it and less unemployment.

I'll just give you the example of unemployment because it's quite tangible. If you produce less, let's say 50% less, you know, as we've seen in this kind of volume de-growth, we have better phones instead of changing them every two years, we do that, you know, every four years. And so we can afford to produce less phone. Then we have a choice. Like, what do we do with the workers? We can just fire half of the workers and tell them, well, go, we don't need you anymore. And then that will generate unemployment for these people. Or we can reduce working time.

Be like, okay, you guys, you shift to 50%. And then you see that these two solutions, which have been used in many different countries during recession, certain countries like the United States tends to favor firing the people that are not just, if you have a drop in demand, just fire the people and labor laws are just kind of flexible enough to do this. Other countries

like Japan, for example, tend to go for adapting working time to the shift in demand. And so here, there's no natural law. That means that when an economy slow down, people get out of a job. It's

it's a more deeply political question of how do we split, you know, the available work, that is, and how do we kind of distribute the value of that work? In the case of a poor country, that would be a very difficult problem to solve because you don't have much wealth in the first place. And so somehow, maybe perhaps you don't even have enough resources. You know, if these people, they get, we produce half less. Maybe that means that theoretically there will be some people in poverty. But in the case of high-income countries, we are not in that situation

because we have such a massive macroeconomic surplus that we can actually afford to work less as long as we are willing to redistribute wealth more equitably. Yeah, and I love how, you know, when we think about degrowth and we read your book and other policy ideas, we can feel that, not only is degrowth not harmful, like it doesn't have to be the harmful elements of a recession because it's planned, like you said, but it can actually lead to win-wins, right? Like you're identifying with reducing working hours or guaranteeing employment. Other things that, you know, would be win-wins, debt cancellation, banning some forms of

advertising or maybe bullshit jobs, the criminalization of planned obsolescence, banning pesticides, closing domestic flight routes and encouraging more public transportation of trains, right? Like, these things we can feel into are not less, like, harmful to us, but actually can be win-win situations. Do you agree with that? And any other examples you'd share? Completely. Advertising is just my favorite example because I hate it so much. Like, I've been looking for years for someone that just rejoice at the thought of

of, you know, when you click on something on the window on the web and you see this just 10 pop-up windows trying to sell you anything from online, you know, sport betting or SUVs or whatever, you know, no one enjoy this. No one enjoy the thought of a triple burger, you know, when you wake up in the morning and you're trying to get on the bus. And, you know, the 99.9% of people being exposed to. to that new luxury SUV ads, knowing that in any case, in their entire life,

they will never have the purchasing power to buy it. So imagine all of the fear of missing out that you're creating through a single ad where 99.9% of people are like, oh, damn it, I'll never be able to afford this. And statistically, there's no one that will at this moment need an information about that SUV desperately looking for.

it and turn your eyes and be like, oh, here's the information I was so desperately looking for. You won't even have that because there is no information on the ad. It's just an SUV with an eagle that's saying, you know, that's freedom and so cool. You know, it's just trying to tap into your emotion. So weirdly, I tend to think that a world without advertising would be a more pleasant world. Then some people, economists will tell me, yeah, yeah, yeah, but okay, I do you finance the press? How do you finance, you know, public renovation? How do you this and this? And what about people working in advertisement? The first thing I say is that imagine all the neurons that we're wasting in advertising. Some of our smartest and brightest. They go sit in universities

for years to learn psychology, communication, and semantics, linguistics, all of that to just then spend, you know, 40 to 50 hours every week trying to convince us to buy stuff we don't need. I mean, if that's not the very definition of a counterproductive activity, I don't know what is. So if you were to manage to say, well, like some cities are doing, let's just limit advertising. Like, let's just ban advertising for polluting product.

Let's just ban advertising in public spaces. Let's just ban advertising targeting children. I mean, last time I checked, I think there was only a handful of countries, including Sweden, that banned advertising targeting children under 12. I mean, again, I've never managed to see someone defending the position that we should advertise for children under 12 and why that's a good thing. That's one of the absurdities you mentioned that is only here because it facilitate, you know, the accumulation of profits for private costs. corporations. So no, I do think that getting rid of that counterproductive layers in the economy will actually lead to a more pleasant life. But then I think we also need to be lucid about not everything is going to be a win-win. One of my job currently is to devise a method to estimate

basically the size of the degrowth gap from one country to another. And right now I'm working on Switzerland. So I measure, let's say, the ecological overshoot of the Swiss economy. And then I'm measuring, you know, the efficiency gains every year for the last 30 years to know what can we expect, you know, what is being green at the moment. And then from these calculations, I can derive, you know, a degrowth gap. And then I can translate that gap into economic terms. So I know that, you know, we're looking at a reduction of 5%, of 10%, of 80% of 90%. And then once you do this, you realize that you have the win-win situation, which are great, but then you have other efforts. And that's where you need to have another way of making a difference between the social usefulness of different goods and services, which is something we don't do often.

I mean, we do it every day when you're a customer. I mean, you have a limited income, mostly your wage, and then you decide to spend it on whatever makes you happy. It's not infinite. it. But now, right now, we need to apply the same rigor to biophysical budgets. Like these biophysical budgets, they're very limited, almost exhausted for highly polluting countries and historical, you know, countries that have a very high historical responsibility. And so we cover the win-win that's easy, but then we have to make a decision of cutting certain goods and services. We can start from the most highly polluting.

and the one that are less contributing to well-being. And then we go down the list to the point where we actually manage to get into planetary boundaries. And what I fear, and I'll end on this, is that the more we wait, the smaller our biophysical budgets get. And so the more we will need to get down the list to the point where actually we will be touching goods and services that are very useful in everyday life. we're not talking about, you know, the area of SUVs, of useless weekend flights and fast fashions, you know, and we'll be talking about just food and basic mobility. Maybe we'll have to kind of decide between different kinds of health services, the one we can afford to keep and the one we have to cut down. And I think one of my job is an ecological economist is to try to avoid that terrific, no, in English, I think it's a in French, terrific is back. So I'm using Terrific. Terrible.

This would be a terrible situation. Yes. Yeah. No, thank you for that. The budget piece that really makes sense and how our window or the decisions we can make are changing, right? And one thing that comes to mind is flights. So in your book, you say, you know, what if we had a limit to how many flights we could take a year, right? And you had like maybe the first flight you could take, but the second flight you'd have to pay a fee. and then, you know, and maybe you'd have some kind of limit. And then, of course, you clarify that first you would, you know, ban or severely limit, like,

private jets in that whole world. So it would even be that first before impacting every day, you know, the 99%. But what I'm hearing is, you know, the deeper we get into the climate crisis and the more overshoot that we create, like those basic flights, you know, we're going to have to keep cutting and cutting and cutting what is possible in our everyday life. Is that what you mean? Is that an example? That's exactly what I mean.

and if we continue that ecological inaction, we'll get to a point where you having a flight means someone else won't. Like that can of terrifying zero-sum game. And so sometimes the exercise we do in modeling is we get back to the 1970s and we try to imagine what if right now we had a time machine and we could go back to the publication of the limits to growth report in 1972, what would we do, you know? And back then, the transition was very easy in the sense of, you know, the overshoot were small.

The alternative technologies were expensive or non-existent, but, you know, if you were to just kind of shift your economy, wartime mode, being like right now the priority is really to invest every single of or available neuron into developing, you know, low carbon forms of energies. Would have done that. It would have taken a bit of time. And then, you know, you have access to that low. carbon energy, low-carbon electricity that you can use. So that's this first idea of kind of changing the metabolism, the biophysical metabolism of your economy, so that it can run sustainably. So that's an issue of scale.

And then you have the issue of distribution of what that economy produces. And then I think when we realize today that our economy will have to get smaller, that means that we cannot afford high levels of inequality. Today, if you have an economy that is growing every year, you can at least pretend that one day, you know, that wealth is going to trickle down to the pockets of the poorest and that everyone will escape poverty. I mean, that has been a very popular political discourse.

Of course, it's false empirically and theoretically. And there's been a great economist like Toma Piccetti and Julia Cajé in France, for example, that have been demonstrating. that this is not happening and this won't happen. But at least you can sense it. If your economy is getting smaller, then, you know, if you don't do anything specific to address inequality, then that's not going to work.

And so that's why sometime I think people, they say, well, degrowth is just some kind of environmental excuse to just reduce inequality, some kind of, you know, a watermelon. you know, some kind of Marxist plot disguised as an environmental urgency. But I don't see it like this. I just see it in a very pragmatic manner. Like an economy is here to maintain quality of life,

to produce these things people need. And, I mean, one of the key challenge in economics is to make sure that people, everyone has enough. It's a difficult challenge, but, I mean, everyone would argue that, you know, It's an economy where every year you have some people that don't have enough health, food, housing, transport, all of that is an economy that is failing. You know, it's not a good thing. That's consensual. And so when you match it with the environmental crisis, you realize that we will have to get much better at reducing inequality that what we've been doing in the last decade, which is basically, you know, frantically pressing the GDP button with the magical thinking of that will just,

remove poverty. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Timote Parique. We'll be right back. I don't know. I'm going to be able to Free a claspian, From you and everybody I am

This lazy band of losers I despise I've always loved to taste of my cold and sweet Now I've learned to cherish it While I watched it smooth, I was at length, now I should. And the world fell off my shoulders, swerving, shadowing into the hall. I realized I also felt what I'm in my sliver at the bottom of that well that way. Take me back, you despise us. Take me back, you betrayed us.

Take me back, you destroyer. Take me back. Don't leave me to myself. With you with you and do anybody else. I was never upon Just lost my complete confession You were never on my shoulder But I am alone I'm alone

But I am no But I know Oh I know I know That was Atlas by Muma. Now, back to our conversation with Timote Parique. You know, this gets to one of the challenges that this idea of GDP being a measurement,

for development, even on our show. We'll invite folks on to talk about maybe China or the Sahil states and, you know, other places. And it's just so easy to bring up GDP, like, you know, under socialism or communism, GDP has advanced, right? Like, we, we use these examples as a benefit or as something's working here. And yet that number just does not articulate what's really happening, right? Like what's really happening in that, in that country. A country's rise in GDP could mean, you know, commodification of their waterways and their electricity and could mean, you know, really unsavory and dangerous mining projects coming in, right, or the financialization of their economy. So talk to us about, like, GDP, you know, there's a benefit to the simplicity of it, right,

and how it indicates progress or development. and what you would recommend we'd use instead? I would recommend we use a dashboard of indicators. After a decade working on these issues, I think I don't believe in the myth of, you know, the single indicator that would capture prosperity. I don't think it exists. I don't think it's possible. Prosperity is a multifaceted things.

You have cultural, political, social, economic dimension. And when you think about even your own life, you know, what does it mean to be happy? Like, to live a happy life. Like, instinctively, you will think about several things. You know, you will think about the relationship you have with your families and friends, but you also think about, you know, you need to have a healthy diet and have access to food. You need to have free time, a job that you like. So, you know, we have this kind of dashboard way of thinking about success.

And so it's quite unnatural. to dump it down to a single number. And if we were to dumb it down to a single number, you know, the speed of monetary transaction is really a random, it's really a poor choice. So I think right now we need to evacuate this simplicity, which is also, it's a false sense of simplicity.

Like GDP, and I've spent the last 10 years trying to better understand that curious little indicators. it is so complicated, so abstract, so almost impossible to predict. And even the GDP figures you see on TV, you know, when an economy will be like, oh, the Chinese economy has been growing this and that, that these figures, they are constantly even just six months after revised, to be like, oh, no, we actually realized it was less than that or more than that. And so it's not even a very precise number.

It's not even something, it's rather, I mean, the way I see it is, we have this curious geopolitical obsession. And so GDP has become some kind of egometric for countries to boast and be like, oh, you know, see, GDP is going up. And so therefore our economy is cool. We're going in the right direction, which is strange because GDP is not a directional indicator. It's like a, you know, these little device you can use to count. the steps you make every day. Well, it's the same. But, I mean, you can be in a prison cell

and just do a little circle all day long and you will walk a certain number of steps or you can just walk the step you need to go from A to B where you actually want to go, the same number of steps. Or maybe even the step to go to where you want to go or less than the one of just walking in your jail cell all day.

So, you see, looking at the number of steps is stupid. It's a very stupid measure of happiness. So for me, I would just use something a bit like we've seen in New Zealand. New Zealand in 2019 introduced what they call the well-being budget. So it's a dashboard of 65 indicators. It doesn't have to be that many. In Switzerland, they have what they call the Measures du Biennette measures of well-being with 45 indicators. You can't even less than that. Like Kate Ray Worth in her, you know, in the inner layer of the donut, she has, I think, 12, you know, measures, social minimal. So they are now, like,

since the 1970s, an abundance of alternative indicators. But we're not using them, and we're caught in that game. And I think now the resurgence of armed conflict is really showing us that this is not a rational choice. Since of this is, there's been heavy path dependency of, you know, the Cold War was the moment where GDP and the pursuit of growth was really cemented. into politics.

And now we're still struggling to escape that kind of competition between different economic systems on which one is going to be the most productive in terms of boosting economic growth. Whereas, I mean, I could imagine a word. Imagine a meeting, you know, a UN meeting of different countries

where they could boast about like, Sweden could come and be like, you know what, we just eradicated poverty last year. And people would be like, ooh, nice, Carl, that's nice. You know, and then Bolivia would be like, you know what? Yeah, but we with our new laws on Bwendovier and Ecoside, we've managed to completely help out deforestation. And then the others would be to, wow, that's so cool.

You know, there's so many cool things you can do with your economy. And then imagine someone like, you know, I don't know, the German minister of economy. And yeah, yeah, me, I've increased GDP. Like, people would just turn around and be like, that's so weird. It's like, you know, you go to a dinner party with your friends and you ask, you know, what's up? And someone's telling me, oh, you know, we had our second kid and she's healthy, is a beautiful little girl. Someone else, I build my own house. And then someone would be like, and for me, I've got 12% more money on my bank account than last year.

And you're like, we invited this guy. This is such a weird way of looking at success. Wow, I love that example. No, I completely agree. personally have been involved in creating a donut snapshot for California and now for San Jose and San Francisco. So I would say at least the donut is one way that really people are turning towards because of the visualization and the simplification for how we can do that. But also happy to hear about the other examples and the dashboard way. And I love that idea of a group of

leaders coming together and bragging in a different way. I also think about Bhutan coming and saying, you know, we are now, is it carbon negative, right? Like, or we've increased our forest over our land, you know, just great examples like that are really inspiring. Or banning billboards in public places, you know, things like that, implementing a four-day work week, right? So I would love to go back to this idea about alleviating poverty because there is a common myth that only growth will alleviate poverty. As you said, It doesn't actually happen, this trickle down. But how would degrowth alleviate poverty? What's that way, that pathway?

Let's get back to our snow globe. So to eradicate poverty, basically you need to give access to these people in a state of social and material deprivation to whatever they need. It can be health, can be education, can be housing, can be food. So very concretely, you have people that don't have enough to eat, enough to eat, enough to. to house themselves, enough to move themselves, to protect themselves, to entertain themselves, and you want these people to have access to more. So first, that can be two problems. This can be a distribution problem or a production problem.

If you don't have enough food to feed your entire population, well, then that's a production problem. You need to just find a solution to that by just importing or producing more food. Most of the poverty in high-income countries, and I would even say the entirety of of the poverty in countries I've been looking at. Like, France is not a production problem. It's a distribution problem. Like, in theory, like, even if you look at people that are homeless in France,

that's a very small portion of, like, you would take, like, a portion of just, you know, secondary houses that are just left unused, and you could just, like, house them. Same thing for food. You would take a portion of just the food that is wasted at production point. And you would have enough to just, you know, know, completely get rid of hunger in the world. So we see we have these distribution issues.

And so growth or degrowth is not going to change that. Because growth and degrowth, it will change basically the scale of production. If you have a huge food surplus, well, you can afford to produce a bit less, especially, and that's where it becomes interesting, if that makes your economy more efficient. So when we're talking about food, for example, now we are, over-consuming meat, and that's the heaviest part of the environmental footprint of our diet, meat, and especially beef. So that put a strain.

It used a lot of soil, of water, of energy, and it generates a lot of pollution, greenhouse gases, methane, especially. And so if you were to somehow contract that sector, the beef production sector, you know, that you would make it much more efficient, you would liberate a lot of your biophysical budget. So let's say even if you were in a situation where you don't have enough food to feed everyone, well, you would have an interest in somehow, you know,

shrinking, contracting your beef sector, if that means, you know, it makes your food system more abundant and more resilient. So when you connect this social and environmental challenge, you see that degrowth can facilitate the solving of poverty because it makes resources more abundant or less scarce because it avoids the collapse of ecosystems and the consequences on climate change.

The only thing you need to do, of course, is to reorganize the way the economy works because we've seen that the second aspect of growth is this kind of commoditization. And commoditization is a... a process whereas an individual, most likely, a company, a business, a corporation, will privatize something that were previously accessible for free. They will privatize it and then they will sell it back to you. So if before you had access to seeds, to a water source, to community

health, and then a corporation come and just privatize this and then sell it back to you, you fall into poverty, not because the resource has disappeared, but because you're now lacking access because the access has been rationed based on purchasing power. And so we see here that if we guarantee a universal access to certain resources, if we decommodify, if we kind of guarantee what Eleanor Ostrom was calling governance of the commons and what today anarchist would call it commoning. So building community resilience by just allowing, you know,

access to resource to be handled democratically at the community level in order to avoid that kind of economic exclusion for the people that somehow do not have sufficient purchasing power. And when I say this, some people, they would be like, oh, but Tim, you're such an idealist.

You know, you're like, you know, they compare me to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and some kind of do revoir, you know, like a nap utopian. But, I mean, think about how you behave with your friends. Again, think about the common sense. You're throwing a picnic on the weekend and everyone comes. And there is Julie that has just forgotten to bring any food because she stressed in that

week she had a lot on her mind. What are you going to say? Are you going to be like, well, no food, no eat, Julie? So you're going to watch us eat? Like, who's going to do this? You know, I don't think anyone I know. or anyone in general, you know, what you would do, you would just solve that distribution issues.

And even, even if that means, you know, that people will eat slightly less, I'm pretty sure we would be doing it. So that's kind of the common sense way of addressing that problem. So I find it strange that the kind of common sense economics we apply to everyday life and especially to the way we interact with people we like,

then we completely change when we think about macroeconomics. And that's how we create this kind of magical thinking protocols. Just, of course. Yeah, yeah. If Julie just falls into poverty, well, then that means she will just have an incentive not to do it again and this and that and this and that. So I find it very uncommon sense. You're reminding me of a tweet that I once saw about Bernie Sanders, a criticism of him saying, Bernie Sanders should be forced to give away 90% of his birthday cake.

And then somebody wrote, that's literally how a birthday cake works, you know, that like the sharing is part of it, right? And when we are in that community scale. And so, yeah, to take the way that you describe degrowth in your book, you say degrowing an economy means downscaling production and consumption to reduce the ecological footprint in a democratically planned and equitable way while securing our well-being. And what I'm really hearing from this conversation is, you know, de-growing. growth, just the word, it means so much more. And it actually really needs these other things along with it, the democratically planned part, the equitable part, the securing our well-being part, right? Like all of these are really important components when articulating de-growth to really, you know, share why it's so important. And another piece of this is that you have de-growing as a verb, right? And so I love this idea of like de-growing as a verb. It's a transition. It's a pathway. Right, but the end goal is not to be in degrowth forever, right, so that we degrowth till we have no economy. So bring us to what is that desired outcome after the degrowth.

After we've we've assessed our budgets, as you've articulated, and we've democratically planned this way to downscale our production and consumption. We've secured our well-being. You know, we've done this equitably. What are we left with at the end of that? I love that question. And that's the topic of my second book. I've been writing intensely this summer on post-capitalist utopias. Because I think it's important to, today we're experiencing such a crisis of imagination.

You know, like, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And so we need to spend some time muscling up or utopian thinking, like dream bigger in the sense of just asking yourself that question. You know, you can ask yourself, like, in which country do you want to live? What language do you want to learn? And how many kids do you want to have? No one ever ask you, like, what kind of economic system do you want to have? Like, no, we just assume everyone has capitalism and you're fine with it. So I think right now I want a diversity of economic futures.

And the one I've been imagining, which people call it by different names. In France, we call it convivial. There's this idea of convivialism applied to the economy. There's the well-being economy. that is also a popular concept now. What I'm trying to do in this book is to do a very wide typology of these alternatives to show what they have in common and to show their differences. But here we can just play a bit with it and imagine like, you know,

how that will be to live in that world. First, I mean, as a ecological macroeconomist, I need to remind people that this will be a steady state. That's another perhaps traumatizing term. But, you know, the way we've been talking about Degro, some people tell me, like, why don't you just not tell us first about post-growth and the well-being economy and eco-socialism and solar punk and all this called, you know, anarchist utopias, the world we could be living in. I was like, yeah, no, we could do this.

That would be cool. But the alcoholic anonymous is not called the sobriety club. You know, it's just you need to face the problem first. And the problem we're facing is that we will have. have to go through a temporary phase of degrowth. If we want to get there, we need to lighten the ecological footprint, otherwise ecosystem collapse and known of these futures, except the one you see in Mad Max, will be possible. So that's first, and then second, when we land into that economy, like Katrin Trebek, she's

making this analogy of, you know, the economics of arrival. We've designed an economy like a plane that can just kind of climb up and all with climb up, but we never thought about the landing, and now we need an economics of arrival. And so a dynamic steady state means that you integrate the biocapacity of your ecosystems as a crucial information to determine how much you can produce. That's something that sounds extremely technocratic and complicated, but if you ever have been gardening, you're doing this unconsciously. You know, if you have a small garden pot, you're not going to plant 3,000 plants of tomato.

Like, you realize that's not going to work. So same thing here, but subtle things. You know, the amount of land where you can build stuff on. Some species you can afford to disturb and other you cannot. You know, the water streams, specific pollutants that you can discharge in ecosystems, but only up to a threshold, a specific number of things. fish, you can fish without collapsing, the fish stocks. You know, these kind of when to stop rules. They will be very important. But I think, I don't like to think this as a kind of

overly scientific. I'm much more inspired by a South American philosophies like Buen Bivir and this idea of the good life where people imagined ourselves in a community of living beings. And that led me to that weird thought experiment I did when I was working at Loon University of like, imagine how we would need to reorganize our economy if we had the value of nonviolence, you know, like Buddhist monk have, you know, they cannot use machinery because they're too afraid of killing insects, you know, and digging the dirt. Like, imagine if, you know, we had this kind of sacredness projected into other living beings in the same way that, you know, I'm going to be very careful not to kill my dog today.

You know, that's one of my priority. If you tell me, like, you can use that car, but, like, you have one out of two chance of killing your dog. I'm like, well, I'm going to use something else. If you don't have a dog, you can just replace this with your kid. So you see, like, that's priority number one. So imagine if we were to apply the same duty of care, of stewardship, to other living beings, other organisms. And we're just to organize the economy to make sure we care for them and we don't lead to the degradation of their quality of life.

Then that throws us into thought experiment where we feed ourselves completely differently, we travel completely differently, we build stuff completely differently. Another thing that you must have in a steady state economy, and I say this, so I make the link to our wonderful colleague Jennifer Hinton, is that you cannot have for-profit corporations anymore. Because as you said earlier, for-profit corporations, they are a piece of social machinery that has been dumped down to the very single pursuit of just maximizing profits, which leads them to do all kind of social ecological nonsenses. As we've seen, you know, if we didn't have for-profit corporations in the world and applied that logic of for-profit thinking to certain public entities and, you know, it can be also public corporations. like we would not be extracting oil anymore. You know, the only reason why we're still investing in fossil fuel extraction is because some private individuals can just make money out of it. And so I think in that world where we realize that the pursuit of money is not priority number one,

we really make sure to have rules that prevent anyone from capturing the economic machinery for their own individual interest. And that's the concept of cooperativism, of turning companies into cooperative, which is cuter than it sound. It just means that, you know, the company you work in, well, is the company you basically have a say in what's being produced, how much it's being produced,

how you're producing it, and also companies that have a larger impact on the community, well, they must also have, a multi-actor stake older board to basically have a discussion on what they can do and what they cannot do since it impact, you know, the broader community. And in that discussion, and I think we do it instinctively, democratically, we have a dashboard way of thinking. Because the environmental is going to think about the environment. The workers, they're going to think about working conditions. The investors, they're going to think about money. And, you know, if your neighbor, you're going to think

about the noise and the pollution. So, you know, if you just had a kid, you're going to think about you know the future, if you're older, you're going to think about a different temporality. So in that sense, ensuring inclusion in decision-making, make sure that we always have this dashboard way of thinking, which is much more conducing to have an innovative economy because you always have a clash of ideas where people will just be like, but this and this and this and that. And so you will be solving much more complicated problems instead of just doing what capitalism has been so talented at doing, just maximizing.

a very single indicator. So that will be a world without advertising. I think we've noticed. And it will be a world where we work radically less. I'll finish on this because it's particularly controversial. In France, I'm having a few debates as to whether we can afford to work less in a post-growth world.

So the problem is the following. As the economy contract, so we will liberate some working hours for the stuff we will need to produce anymore. So people working in advertising, they will be free to use their living hours to do something else. We'll produce less phone.

So all these hours will be liberated, less extraction of fossil fuels, less financial services. But also, because we will have to use less fossil fuels, certain activities, starting with agriculture, will demand much more labor. And so there will be more hours

that need to be invested in this. Some people say that if you do this huge calculus, it means that, you know, the work week will increase or remain the same. Basically, you know, the anti-degrowth people, they would say like, no, no, if we do this, we'll basically condemn ourselves to spend 12 hours per day in the field, you know, just blowing for food. And the more like pro-degrowth utopians that will tell you, no, no, no, you know, they will be able to just work 10 hours per week and spend the rest, you know,

strengthening or democracy, doing street theaters and making films, writing books, having naps, taking care of our kids, and all the others. I don't, I've not seen any scientific papers that has given a solid number on this approach. What is sure is that I think we need to re-politicize the use of our time. And to have this as a collective decision. You know, like, what do we really need to have a good life? That's the question of sufficiency, of just what is enough, what is considered enough,

and then to have something very strange, but to harness the power of technological progress to be lazy and lazier. Like, that's, you know, I'm a huge advocate of the nap. I'm actually, you know, in theory and in practice, I nap every day. And I think it's a sign of performance that every year, if you manage to be more efficient in doing what you're doing, you have two choices. Either you use these efficiency gains to produce more, which is great if you have a production problem. If you're in a situation of poverty and you produce more, that's great. You can get out of it.

Wonderful. But if you don't have a production problem, what will you do with that? You can also decide to just work less to produce the same amount. And so here we go from a productivist growth-based economy that is turning efficiency into overconsumption to a quality-based, convivialist economy that is turning efficiency gains into more naps. Or more generally, the liberation of free time. And I believe you end your book with, and now I'm going to go take a nap. And I love that. And another quote from your book, you write,

Practicing Voluntary Simplicity and Economy Organized Around Growth is as difficult as playing Grand Theft Auto without committing a crime. So just really speaking to how that, yeah, again, that growth addiction, that productivity is so embedded in us at all scales and how we're really going against the moving sidewalk of growth, you know, in all these layers that you're talking about. And thank you for, yeah, depicting this beautiful, post-growth world where we're working less, we're napping more. But, you know, most importantly,

our needs are met equitably and we have flourishing lives for ourselves very holistically, but also the environment around us is flourishing, right? We are within our limits. And that analogy of our gardening, that makes sense at like widening circles of scale. And so the last question, I want to bring us to the present in terms of the degrowth movement, okay? Because You brought up the Limits to Growth report from 1972, right? And then we've seen different books and different conferences over the years. And you articulate how a few politicians have brought in degrowth, but it really hasn't been that many. And also you articulated the kind of the people who hiss or like who recoil when you mention degrowth and just really react so strongly to it. And then I know that there was the conference of the international society. for ecological economics and degrowth conference, and I know you're very central to those worlds and probably know all the people in those spaces. Personally, I did hear in terms of a little gossip. I heard that there were some tensions between ecological economists and degrowth folks,

and then I've also heard a little bit of tension between Global South or like anti-imperialist practitioners and then degrowth. So I would just love to hear, you know, what are the biggest challenges that we're seeing in the degrowth movement today? Like where are the kind of tensions or areas that we're still figuring out, we're still working on, we're still integrating, we're still including, and then close with, what are we celebrating? What is the, what is the celebration of the degrowth movement today, you know, September 2025? I'll start with the problem, so we can end on the celebration. So degrowth is a, as really a double personality. The first one is that academic concept. So that's the one I'm

mostly concerned with, in the sense of we use it as a theory among university researchers for scientific publication and to better understand the interaction between the economy and ecosystems. And so degrowth has been developing in academia like this. But in parallel, which doesn't happen for every concept, there's also been a degrowth movement, which, well, had as a task. you know, something more political in the sense of gathering a number of people, gathering a number of people, gathering social momentum, to do things.

And of course, these two things, they were always coexistent in the sense of the degrowth movement was being inspired by concept in theories, developed in academia, and, you know, theorists, they were also being inspired by action of activists and dreams of people in the degrowth movement. And very often, these people were also the same, so both working in the university as scientists and also being actively involved in concrete utopias or, you know, the launch of citizen convention and political parties, which is not incompatible at all. You can do both in your life and excel in those two.

the problem is that de-growth does not have a monopoly in, you know, solving the world injustices. And I think early on, it was tricky to communicate with different movements. So I'm thinking about eco-socialism, there's been this conceptual war for a decade between, you know, eco-socialism versus de-growth that has been solved a few years ago when they realized that actually, one, that they were very compatible. Degrowth was more of a transition phase in eco-socialism with more depiction of kind of the long-running functioning of that system and that actually they had more in common than differences and that it was a bit silly to just invest that much effort and just throwing stones at each other.

And I think that conflict you mentioned between traditional ecological economists that are mostly scientist, getting a bit freaked out by the multidisplicity of, you know, the modern degrowth movement, which is much more encompassing because it is connected to many anti-imperial struggles, feminist struggles, anti-war struggles, and things that, you know, an older, perhaps ecological economists would consider it to be outside of the problem. It's like, no, I focus on climate, biodiversity, the rest is just for humans to sort after that. And maybe modern degrowthers, there would be, no, no, but if we build a movement for social momentum, we need to have this intersectionality between this.

So that, of course, can lead to some conflict, and some can be constructive if they're not too much based on ego and that. A celebration, I'll bring two celebrations in mind for each of that dimension. The first one is scientific. When I started studying de-growth, so the first time I've heard the concept was in the summer school, the University of Barcelona back in 2014.

And I was fresh out of my master's in environmental economics. I had studied economics all my life, so I was pretty much framed to be against de-growth. And I was at first. So I learned about that concept, and I start to write a PhD thesis in economics about it. And back then, the main backlash was people arguing degrowth is unnecessary because you can green growth. Not only because you can green growth, but because growth is actually being greened.

And so we notice, you know, this kind of unfolding decoupling countries managing to both increase their GDP and decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. And so therefore, why are we talking about slowing down? You know, the problem is getting solved. And that was back then in 2014, 15, 16, you had to argue. You had to be like, look, but no, you're not looking at this. You had to demonstrate somehow that, you know, green growth was impossible. But 10 years later, now I don't think there's anyone, like any academics,

that would scientifically try to make the case, you know, that somehow this decoupling concerning all aspects of our environmental footprint is just happening fast enough to be compatible with science-based sustainability strategies, you know, having to do with planetary boundaries. Like, no one is taking that challenge. And, I mean, I'm slightly more arrogant than the average economist. And so when I published decoupling debunked in 2019, which was based on the section of my thesis, you know, I announced with my co-authors where like, look, that's the challenge. If you think we're wrong, here's the six points where you can show we're wrong.

just do it and we'll change our mind and then that will be, you know, that problem will be solved. I've been so surprised that that piece demonstrating somehow that we won't be able to decouple fast enough economic growth. I mean, the bio, let's say, economic activities from environmental pressures has not been falsified. It is still standing. So it's a scientific victory and now the issues has moved. So now the backlash is not on decoupling and green growth. this is people say, yeah, okay, we agree that this is impossible.

But we think that degrowth is even more impossible because, you know, it's political suicide, because in the world of conflicted geopolitics and war, no one will decide to decrease their kind of economic power. So, you know, it's a shifting argument, which

can be a sign of progress. It means we're digging and we're getting, you know, it's like a video game where you have different buses. You know, we won against a few buses. And so we're getting to the next level, so there's still a backlash, but in fighting every one of these bosses, I think we uncover new knowledge. And the second celebration is that back in 2008, that was the first international de-growth conference organized in Paris. And there were like

130 people there. You know, it was just a, it was like a picnic. You know, it was very low-key. And now the last one, which I think was the 17th one, or I mean, there's been, a lot of events since, gathered more than a thousand people in Oslo. So there's now like a variety of people getting interested into this. The concept has gotten massively popular. I mean, imagine me. I wrote a 900-page PhD thesis in theoretical economics about de-growth. I mean, that's just that document was born to be forgotten.

You know, it was designed to be ignored. And I was so surprised when I was so. ready, after four years of work, to just go back surfing and forget about that PhD thesis that actually a lot of people started reading it and getting interested in the topic. And that's why I decided to write the book, which has not been translated into 10 languages. I mean, in France, we're just 50,000 copies for books on economics, in economics on degrowth. That's insane. And so there's this growing appetite that shows it's a burn.

question. And that's cause for celebration because it means more and more people start to question their reality from his, you know, after Matrix, I see it as a kind of a red pill topic. If you start wondering about degrowth, if you know what degrowth is, you know, it means you've already like, you've already been offered a blue pill versus red pill choice. And that's good. Because we want, I think it's a good thing as a modern intellectual, you know, someone working at University, I think I want to enrich the political debate, giving more and more options, giving more rigorous concept so that people can sharpen their critical thinking, their utopian thinking, as to be able to better understand their present, to shape their future and invent

better futures. So that's what we're celebrating today. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Timote Parique, an economist originally from Versailles France. He's currently a researcher at H.E.C. Lausanne, the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He works on macro-ecological planning in Switzerland as part of the Strive Research Project. He's also author of Slow Down or Die, The Economics of Degrowth. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to MoMA for the Intermission Music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover-up.

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