“No, degrowth is not a vague concept”: ten economists respond to Jean Pisani-Ferry

Jean Pisani-Ferry's recent column on degrowth urges us to react collectively, as members of the French-speaking Society for Ecological Economics. Writing that it is a vague concept, that it has "no clear macroeconomic meaning" the day after the closing of the international conference jointly organized by the International Society for Ecological Economics and the International Degrowth Conference, amounts to deliberately turning a blind eye to decades of research and hundreds of scientific articles published on the subject.

To say that degrowth does not offer a "better measure of economic performance" than gross domestic product (GDP) and its derivatives is to miss the point of this movement, which does not reduce the question of measurement to a purely technical choice and intends to put the purposes of economic activity back at the center of the debate - ensuring a collective well-being, which is not at the expense of the environment, the poorest or future generations.

There is not "one" macroeconomic theory behind the notion of degrowth, but a diversity of research teams that coexist, exchange and strengthen the theoretical foundations of a new economic model. An entire section of this research is devoted to the macroeconomic modeling of what would be "a planned and democratic transformation of the economic system in order to radically reduce the ecological impact and inequalities and to improve well-being" , to use the most recent common definition of degrowth. Certainly, there is still work to be done to think, in particular, about the relations between countries of the North and the South. Certainly, there is no turnkey system. But, in the 1960s, did [Milton] Friedman, [Friedrich] Hayek and the members of Mont-Pèlerin have anything other than theories, whose shortcomings are constantly reminding us of today?

You have 72.53% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.