How Degrowth Will Reshape Technology

Paris Marx: Jason, welcome to Tech Won’t Save Us.

Jason Hickel: Thanks very much. Nice to be with you.

PM: Great to speak with you. We were talking a bit before this that I’ve been looking forward to having a degrowth conversation for a while. And I think that for some listeners, they will probably be quite familiar with this concept. Others might’ve heard of it before, but might’ve heard kind of differing definitions of what that actually means. So if you were going to explain degrowth to an audience, how would you tell them what this concept is?

JH: Okay. Well, it’s pretty straightforward. Basically it recognizes that high income countries have extremely high levels of material use and very high levels of energy use. And the high levels of material use are a problem because this is a major driver of ecosystem pressure around the world. A lot of this is net appropriated from the Global South. So there’s a big kind of just justice issue there at stake as well. And the high energy use is a problem because basically it makes it extremely difficult for us to decarbonize fast enough to reduce emissions within our fair share of the Paris agreement’s objectives.

So, a pretty straightforward piece of information, I guess, that degrowth has given to the world is simply that the more energy you use in an economy, the more difficult it is to achieve really rapid decarbonization. And that’s kind of the problem that we face right now. We’re decarbonizing way too slow. A lot of that has to do with our really high energy use. And scientists are increasingly clear that if we want to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization, we’re going to have to scale down total energy use. Now, of course, some of that can be achieved through efficiency improvements. And I guess we’ll talk about that a little bit. This is clearly really essential and we should pursue this as aggressively as possible.

But we also know from the empirical literature that this alone is not enough, and so degrowth adds another element, which is we also need to scale down less necessary forms of production in order to reduce total energy use more directly. So, and this is, I think, an important thing to clarify is that degrowth does not call for reducing all forms of production. This is the immediate misunderstanding that people have. People think: Oh, you just want to slow down the entire economy and this is obviously going to leave us in poverty.

But degrowth actually calls for: Let’s identify very energy intensive and materially intensive forms of production that are also socially unnecessary, like mostly are organized around capital accumulation and elite consumption, etc, etc. SUV production, private jets, cruise ships, fast fashion, things like this, like big parts of our economy that are clearly not important for human well being are very ecologically destructive and we can scale down.

So that’s kind of the proposition. And it’s interesting because the empirical evidence that we have on this, which is now a very robust field of research shows that by taking this approach, by scaling down less necessary forms of production, we can reduce energy demand a lot. And also at the same time, maintain and improve human well being by reorganizing production around socially necessary things. And this enables us to achieve decarbonization fast enough to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement objectives, while also reducing pressure on extractivism from the Global South. So that’s kind of it in a nutshell, I suppose. But there’s much more that one could say about it.

PM: And of course, we’ll dig into more of those pieces, and I’m sure we’ll have more to say on it. But that is a great kind of concise definition, I guess, of what this actually means. And I think many people, when they hear that, will contrast that with the scenarios that we hear about more often where we’re told that things should keep staying the same, we should keep growing the economy, keep using more energy, but we’ll use technology to simply mitigate those climate concerns that come with it.

How does degrowth differ from this model that we basically widely adopted in that there is a growing movement that pushes back against degrowth that says, no, this is all we need, as long as we have more technologies than this will make it so that we don’t need to make these hosted compromises that degrowth says we need to make?

JH: Exactly. Okay. So basically, the green growth kind of climate mitigation scenarios or ecological mitigation scenarios, effectively say we can keep everything the same, the existing kind of capitalist growth oriented economy, and also reconcile this with ecological objectives, purely through technological change. And this is interesting because a lot of people see this dichotomy between the green growth scenarios and the degrowth scenarios and they think degrowth is just anti technology and green growth is pro technology. Well, technology sounds good to me, so I guess I’m in the green growth camp and anti technology sounds backwards to me and unscientific, so I’m going to reject that.

But, but this is totally incorrect. It’s a very strange narrative that’s out there that degrowth is somehow anti technology. It’s wrong. If you look at all of the published degrowth climate mitigation scenarios, they start with ambitious technological change. rapid innovation and efficiency improvements, et cetera, et cetera. But they keep these within the limits of empirical feasibility, and then they recognize this is not going to be enough. And so we’re also going to need to scale down less necessary forms of production to enable faster decarbonization, etc., etc.. The green growth scenarios take a different approach.

They basically ratchet up the tech lever to levels that are a little bit bizarre, actually. So let me explain a little bit what’s going on. So they face a conundrum because they start with the assumption that high income nations should continue to increase total production for the rest of the century, which means very high energy demands is perpetuated for the rest of the century. And this makes rapid decarbonization really difficult. And so they resort to several basically technological tricks.

One of them, the most common, is they rely on massive deployments of negative emissions technology. The main one is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. This is called BECS. Basically, you use a bunch of land to grow biofuels. This pulls carbon out of the atmosphere. You turn the biofuels into power through power stations, capture the carbon, store it under the ground. It sounds great, but it requires an incredible amount of land, something like three times the size of India, competes with food production, exacerbates deforestation and biodiversity loss and water depletion, etc, etc. And so scholars increasingly are questioning the use of massive scaled BECS in these scenarios. That’s one.

The second thing is they basically ratchet up efficiency improvements to levels that can radically decouple GDP from energy use. So you have rising GDP and really rapidly declining energy use. Now, we know that efficiency improvements can lead to GDP energy decoupling, and that’s exciting. But there’s a problem, which is that in a growth oriented economy, the gains that you make from efficiency improvements are generally leveraged to expand total production, and this makes it difficult to achieve lasting, large, absolute reductions in energy use or material use. The scale effect of growth kind of works against the efficiency improvement. Somehow it wipes out some of those gains. So that’s the second thing.

And then the third thing is particularly problematic, and that is effectively that they maintain high energy use in the Global North by suppressing energy use in the Global South, in many cases to levels that are below subsistence. This is wildly unjust and clearly unacceptable, and so we can’t have a situation where we’re balancing high energy use in the Global North on effectively imperialist suppression in the Global South. I think we, especially as socialists, should be able to reject that out of hand. So when we recognize the limits of these different levers, then I think we have to take a hard look in the mirror and realize, okay, we need technological improvements, but we also need these to be feasible and just.

So in addition, we’re going to also need to scale down less necessary forms of production. And that’s kind of the proposition that’s on the table, really. And, when you explain it to people like this, in terms of: We should reduce less necessary forms of production. I think most people kind of agree with us. It’s sort of insane that in the middle of an ecological emergency, we are increasing production of SUVs and private jets and, fast fashion, etc, etc. This is wild. It’s also wild that we are diverting huge amounts of our energy demands. our energy resources and material resources to servicing elite accumulation. And so I think that the degrowth proposition here is what if we just scale down those less necessary forms of production and also scale down elite command over our productive capacities. This can make it possible for us to decarbonize a lot faster.

PM: Absolutely. And I feel like even what you’re describing there, we can see playing out right now, whether it’s when we look at electric cars and how they are being positioned as this way to solve the emissions from the transportation system, rather than making massive investments in, say, public transit and rail infrastructure and things like this. Instead, that would have far lower So, I think that’s energy demands than the electric vehicles, not to mention, all the extraction that is necessary for the batteries and the electric vehicles.

But then on top of that, it’s kind of AI hype that we see over the past year or so that requires a ton of water, a ton of energy to build these data centers. And again, not to mention the extraction to build the computer parts. So, we’re in this moment where we can see very clearly the conflicts, which are exactly what you’re describing.

JH: Exactly, I think the transport sector is really interesting here because look, basically what I’m arguing is that we need a double barreled approach. We need efficiency and technological change on the one hand, but also sufficiency and equity on the other hand, and what’s interesting is that this double barreled approach is clear in all of the successful mitigation models. And the transport sector is an important one. There was a recent study published in Nature that explored possibilities for transport sector decarbonization in high income countries in line with the Paris Agreement goals. And they basically found very clearly, yes, we need a rapid upscaling and deployment of EVs.

EVs are a critically necessary technology here. So we need investment in that, but we also need a rapid and large scale reduction in car use. And I’m literally quoting from the study. This is the only way that you can manage to achieve Paris compliance decarbonization. So we need both. It’s not about rejecting technology here. It’s about embracing technology and also adding on this other element. So in transportation, I mean, clearly we also need rapid investments in, in public transits, in active mobility options within cities and things like that. This has to be on the table.

And the idea that we’re just going to solve this problem by producing 1 billion electric vehicles is just wild. There’s just no empirical basis for this and the climate mitigation literature. And this is important because the people that tend to gravitate towards tech solutionism also claim the mantle of empirics. They claim the mantle of science, but there’s a conflict here between tech solutionism and science where you have literal scientists who study this saying, wait a second. Yes, the tech is important, but there’s something else required here. And I think we just have to be able to embrace that into our thinking.

PM: We need to be able to look at the bigger picture of this. And certainly not be against electrification in any way, but to recognize that if it’s just all in on electric cars, that requires a lot more energy use and resource use than if we also have these other forms of transportation and put a lot more energy into energy, meaning like our kind of incentives and things like that into building out and achieving those. And that actually helps us cut emissions a lot faster than just getting everyone who owns a gas or diesel car now to buy an electric one.

JH: Totally. Exactly.

PM: And so, you gave us a really good overview of these two different points in what we were talking about there. And so I want to drill down on some of those right now, particularly this question of growth. This is something that we talk about a lot. We’re always talking about how much the economy has grown in a particular quarter or year. And, there’s this general assumption that growth is this inherent good, if the economy is not growing, then everything is going to get worse. And if it is growing, then that means that our society is going to get better. But as you’ve written about this idea of growth is really linked to GDP, which is a particular measure that leads us to try to pursue particular economic goals. So can you talk about what we’re actually doing when we pursue growth and what that actually means?

JH: This is so interesting to me. So, we talk about growth, people assume that means progress or improvements in well being, et cetera, et cetera. But I think we have to understand what growth actually is. Because obviously, there’s a very specific definition to it, which is an increase in total aggregate production in an economy, as measured in market prices. Now, with a metric like this, it does not differentiate between socially beneficial forms of production and destructive forms of production. Everything is just considered equivalent on the basis of market prices. So if you produce a million euros worth of tear gas and cruise ships, this is worth exactly the same as a million euros worth of public housing and public transit and healthcare.

But clearly when it comes to wellbeing and social progress and even innovation, one of these is better than the other. And so really a more rational approach to the economy is to think about what are the forms of production we actually do want to increase. And what forms of production are less necessary and destructive, and we can decrease. And this is actually not a radical point to make, I should emphasize. It actually comes originally from, well, I mean there’s a long history of this thought, but Simon Kuznets, who was the inventor of the GDP metric himself, in the 1930s. He stood up in front of the US Congress and he was like: Look, this is a useful and powerful measure, but whatever you do, you should never use it as the primary metric of economic and social progress, precisely because it doesn’t differentiate between what’s bad and what’s good.

And he was just like: Look, when we call for more growth, we need to specify growth of what, for whose benefits, for what purpose, what are the objectives here. Now in a capitalist economy, let’s think about it. In a capitalist economy, Production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital. So this is the big corporations, the major financial firms, the 1 percent who control the majority of investable assets. They’re the ones making decisions about what to produce. And for them, the objective is very clearly not to improve well being or to achieve social progress or a call ecological regeneration or anything like that. Their overriding objective is to maximize and accumulate profits.

So what that means is that they organize production around that objective. They make investments toward that objective. And so we get perverse forms of production. We get massive production of SUVs in fast fashion, total scarcities, like massive underinvestment and things like renewable energy and public transit and affordable housing and building insulation, things like that. Because these things are not profitable or a lot less profitable. In fact, I think the energy question is a really important example of this. Renewable energy is a lot cheaper than fossil fuels. Well, it’s cheaper than fossil fuels, and people kept expecting that there would be suddenly a massive rapid transition once the cheapness factor kicked in.

But that’s not happening, and the reason is because fossil fuels, despite being more expensive, are a lot more profitable. So capital flows to fossil fuels because the profits are like three times as high. And so in the middle of an ecological emergency, we’re getting continued investment in fossil fuels and too little investment in renewables. I mean, this is totally insane. And so energy is an example of this kind of perverse investment pattern, whereas in a properly democratic economy, where we have democratic control over investment and production.

We would very clearly organize our productive forces, our collective labor, our planet’s resources around achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives rather than just pursuing what’s most profitable. So I think that’s really like the horizon. We talk about wanting to solve the ecological crisis. I don’t see it being solved within the existing arrangements where capital determines production. I think it is going to require more democratic control over finance and production.

PM: I think that makes a lot of sense. And as you were saying, you can clearly see some very perverse effects that come of it. As we’re talking about electric cars, when we look at the rollout of something like that, you can clearly see the incentive to sell everybody an electric car rather than roll out public transit, because it works better to increase growth. And on the other hand of things, to really see the incentives to privatize public services instead of keeping these as non market things, because then it’s not a doing as much to contribute to these measures that you’re talking about?

JH: Exactly. This is exactly right. If you think about the things we really need, urgently right now, we need building insulation rapidly. Okay. We need rapid expansion of public transit. We need agroecology. Capital’s not going to invest in these things because they’re not nearly as profitable as the alternatives like EVs and industrial beef farming or whatever it might be. So we’re sort of stuck. It’s like we’re in this bizarre interregnum where we know what needs to be done and yet we can’t do it because we don’t have collective control, democratic control over our own productive capacities.

We’re just kind of hostage to whatever nightmare capital wants to create. And that’s really the situation we’re in, like people keep saying, Oh, our leaders don’t have a plan, but they do. We’re living in their plan. Their plan is to maintain this particular arrangements and it makes it impossible for us to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization and other kinds of ecological objectives to say nothing of social objectives as well.

We know that in the USA, for instance, in the UK, there’s massive impoverishments among the working classes. People can’t afford healthcare in the US. They live in substandard housing. In the UK, there’s massive food poverty. These are countries that have very high levels of total production and yet still suffer mass deprivation. What explains this? It’s a misallocation of our productive capacities towards things that are profitable, but not towards things that are socially necessary. And I think that’s ultimately for both the ecological crisis and the social crisis, this is ultimately the problem we have to resolve.

PM: And you can also see that when growth is globally considered this metric that everyone has to be held to write that every government is judged based on how much the economy is growing, because that is assumed to be incorrectly, as you’re saying, associated with social progress and these other things that then even if you have a government that comes to power that claims to have a different ideology or want to do something different, they’re immediately constrained by this notion that: No, you need to be doing what works to increase growth, and that shapes the types of policies that you’re going to have to have to pursue so that you’re limited in the types of things that you can do to invest in public services and do these other positive things that you were explaining that we need to do if we want to tackle this crisis.

JH: That’s right. Look, I mean, there’s clearly ways that our economies are kind of dependent on growth. And so policymakers feel that right. They’re kind of like, they also feel trapped in this. Some of it is real, but can be addressed very easily. For example, this goes, it goes back to technology. Our technology is constantly improving. This means that we actually require less labor to do any given level of output, which of course leads to unemployment. And then you have all these unemployed people. This is a social crisis. You need to resolve this. How do they resolve it? Well, let’s grow more private sector production and hope that that creates jobs and mops up that unemployed labor.

And so to deal with a constant problem of unemployment, we have to grow the economy more and more just to avoid this basic social crisis. This is crazy. So ecological economists propose a very simple solution to this, which is you introduce a public job guarantee that can allow people to remobilize the realms, socially and ecologically necessary forms of production. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done, but capital doesn’t mobilize to do that stuff. But publicly we can do that. And a public job guarantee is a crucial way of remobilizing labor around necessary production, and can be also used to set living wages and shorter working hours and democratic conditions at work, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, basically unemployment is an artificial scarcity of capitalism that can be immediately abolished with this policy. So, the other growth imperative that people feel is, well, okay, you want to do all this increase in public production. You want public finance for renewable energy production? You want public finance for improving public transit and healthcare and et cetera, et cetera? Well, okay. How are you going to do that? Well, you’re going to need to grow. You’re gonna have to have growth in the private sector. And then tax their revenues to fund public services. And so you feel like you’re in this trap.

I want to do all these important public things, but I can’t. I’m going to need more growth in the private sector. What do we do? But here again, I mean, this is a fallacy. Corporations don’t produce money. They produce things. And it’s ridiculous for us to say that we need to grow production, increase production of cruise ships and AI and private jets or whatever in order to increase production of public transit and building insulation or public health care. I mean, this doesn’t make any sense. You don’t need to increase production of bad things to increase production of good things. We can increase the production of good and necessary things directly. through a public finance strategy that can be implemented by any government that has sovereign control over their currency.

You issue the currency to fund whatever you require. This is basic to industrial policy. Of course, there’s limits to your ability to do this. And the limit, of course, is inflation. If you’re using money to mobilize a bunch of additional public production, you’re competing with the existing forms of production that are also demanding labor and resources and factories in the economy. And that’s going to cause inflation unless you reduce demand elsewhere in the economy and that’s precisely what degrowth provides an important answer to is we can scale down less necessary forms of production, thus liberating resources that can be remobilized towards necessary production, which is important because not only is this an inflation proof strategy.

It also allows us to accelerate production and innovation in necessary sectors, and so people who think of degrowth is like: Oh, this is a timid approach to the economy. It’s in fact, not. It’s an accelerationist approach. It recognizes there’s been this misallocation of our productive capacities that can be remobilized to accelerate socially and ecologically beneficial production. And that includes innovation, technological innovation. Right now, our engineers are all deployed by capital to do things like develop new algorithms for advertising on Facebook, or develop new fracking techniques. This is where innovation goes to, but it could be remobilized for other purposes to innovate, more efficient public transits or more ecological building materials, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that capital basically misallocates, not just our productive capacities, but our innovation capacities as well.

PM: No, I definitely agree with that. And I feel like the inflation point is an important one to talk about, especially given the moment that we’ve been in for the past year or so, where we’ve really been, been feeling this and it’s been at the top of people’s minds. But I wanted to pivot to this question of energy use, because this is really clearly linked to the growth question and also the limitations that this green growth scenario has in terms of its ability to actually address this fundamental problem of on one hand the climate crisis, but also how the broader economy works and how we power it and how we make sure that all this production is possible.

So when we think about this need to continually increase energy use, how does that constrain our ability to actually reduce emissions and address the climate crisis? And why is that something that we need to specifically focus on when we think about the broader productive capacities of the economy?

JH: Basically like the higher your energy use, when you’re trying to decarbonize your economy, then it means you’re going to need a lot more renewable energy infrastructure outlay, which you cannot just do willy nilly. This is a productive process that requires massive mining to extract the necessary materials, production of the necessary technologies and infrastructure, then the actual installation of it all. You can’t just scale this up at any desired speed at any desired scale. And that’s a problem when we have a time delimited crisis on our hands, if we want to limit global warming to well under two degrees, then particularly in high income countries, there has to be a really rapid decarbonization and high energy use works against that.

I really want to drive home to your listeners. If you can reduce total energy use, you take a ton of pressure off that problem. It’s going to require less mining and extraction for the renewable energy materials. It’s going to require less production of the solar panels and wind turbines, it’s going to require less actual labor and engineering for the installation. So you can, it requires less of the production and also a lot less time. So if you can reduce your total energy use by 50%, I mean, you’re just an unprecedented improvement in your ability to achieve rapid decarbonization and increasingly recognized as the only feasible way for us to do this.

This would be a nice approach. We should talk about this. This is an empirically necessary approach that needs to be part of our agenda. And right now it’s just not, and that’s a problem, there’s a huge disjuncture between how our political leaders And our, let’s call them pundits, our media pundits talk about decarbonization versus what scientists are saying is going to be necessary. That disjuncture has to be reconciled. We’re just going to have to grapple with this reality.

So when you talk about wanting to reduce total energy use, this is not about: let’s ask people to take shorter showers and turn off lights in their houses when they’re not using them. I mean, obviously that’s important, but the big energy users are obviously industries, and so it’s production that uses energy. And so do you really want to be doing all this unnecessary production, which is massively energy intensive, if this is going to make decarbonization harder? So yeah, so scaling down less necessary production was one Massive benefit. There’s also other ways to think about it.

And this also comes again to technology. We can make our products last longer our washing machines our refrigerators our phone our smartphones our laptops. Most of these products have planned obsolescence built into them. They’re actually designed to break down after a few years and to be very difficult to repair. Why? Because it’s profitable for capital to make these kinds of products, but we could also just do the opposite. We could innovate products that are very long lasting and easily repairable and upgradable and modular so that your refrigerator lasts 25 years. And it’s efficiency can be upgraded every time that there’s new improvements in this area.

And your laptop can last 10 years and again, can be upgraded, et cetera, et cetera. Think about it. If you make your products last twice as long, then you need to produce half as many of them. That’s a 50 percent reduction in energy use. That’s a 50 percent reduction in material use. And that enables you to have achieve massive ecological benefits. Of course, again, the battle you’re fighting here is not against reason. Reason is on your side. The battle you’re fighting against is against capital, which of course, finds such a strategy to be antithetical to its main objective of maximizing profits. So, that’s the reality we face right now.

PM: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had tell me that they’re so frustrated by the fact that their appliances don’t last nearly as long as they used to. They die so easily and they’re so hard to repair and it just seems like such low hanging fruit to make sure that types of things like that do last longer. I feel like even as you’re talking about energy use, like we’ve seen some very clear examples of this in the past few years where we had these stories about all of the energy use being used by Bitcoin and crypto currencies and how, in some cases that was even forcing utilities to reactivate or keep online fossil fuel power sources that they were planning to decommission because they needed to power these crypto data centers.

And we’re seeing something similar now with the AI boom, where. All of these companies are building out these massive data centers with really high energy use. That is again, placing a lot of pressure on utilities to be able to power these things. And obviously they need to use fossil power to do it because they can’t build out renewables fast enough for the renewables that they’ve built out with the plans to shut off some of these fossil power sources. Now they just need to use all of it because the energy demand has become so high.

JH: The thing about about like, our products could be so much better. This always, I find this so interesting. We’re told that capitalism is almost synonymous with innovation. And I really feel that’s not true. This is a total lie [laughs]. We live in a shadow of the world that we could live in. We could have much better products, longer lasting products, more durable products. We could have better public transit systems that are high quality, efficient, integrated. Look at the US public transit system. It’s a complete disaster; it’s embarrassing actually. So, we could have much more efficient buildings. Our appliances could be more efficient. If we had a more democratic economy where we can direct investment to what we know is socially and ecologically necessary, we could have much better technologies from the perspective of social needs and ecological objectives.

And we’re sort of stuck in this process where we just can’t get those things. And so we have a scarcity of sort of good technology. Actually, it’s quite strange. I guess there’s another aspect to this too, which is patents. Even the socially necessary technologies that we do have, like a good technology is invented, and suddenly it’s patented, which is great from the perspective of profits, but very bad from the perspective of dissemination.

And so take the COVID vaccines, brilliant technology, let’s celebrate that. But then, more than half the world is effectively cut off from access to this. It’s just crazy. The same was true of the HIV treatments. I think renewable energies are another example. Like if we really want really rapid dissemination of these things, we’re going to have to talk about suspending patents so that they can be much more rapidly disseminated, which I think also aids innovation because then you have Every like self styled engineer around the world can suddenly look at the plans and innovate on them. And that would be very powerful for spurring innovation. But right now all of the that capacity is effectively centralized and locked up.

PM: It’s like the Chinese took the kind of American work on solar panels and then commercialized it and put it on into mass production and made it so it would be so much cheaper to roll out solar technologies or even obviously one of the things for people interested in transportation is always to look at how say China or Japan built out these massive high speed rail networks and you just think of what could be achieved if the United States put the kind of productive capacity and the energy into building out high speed rail in its own countries and the innovation that could potentially come of something like that. But, the incentive isn’t there.

JH: That’s exactly right. And I mean, consider how far behind we are. You can imagine a more advanced technological future. I mean, look at our high speed rail. Now we could have had this high speed rail 30 years ago, like the kind of high speed rail that China is now building could have been in the USA 30 years ago. And then imagine what our high speed rail would be like today, even better. And yet that’s just not the reality we live in because our innovative capacity gets appropriated for just ridiculous things. So it’s just a misallocation of our incredible creative capacities, I think.

PM: I completely agree with you and the thing now that we need to get stuck in traffic and in these big cars all the time, instead of having efficient public transportation systems is it’s just frustrating when you think about it. And I feel like even now, like you see this very clearly. We had this narrative as you’re talking about that capitalism delivers these innovations that we’re having these amazing tech products. Even people like Peter Thiel have been criticizing that idea. He said at one time we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters in reference to an earlier version of Twitter.

Peter Thiel is not someone who I consider an ally, but even then, what we see in this moment is a lot of these tech companies are in the process of actively degrading what benefits did exist in their products just to increase profits, marginally to show shareholders. So even when we do get benefits, those things have to be taken away eventually because profit demands it.

JH: Exactly. And look, I don’t know about others who are more knowledgeable about this, but if you ask me, Facebook is an amazing example of this. It’s a product that if you ask me has been getting worse to the point where it’s almost unusable. Whatever’s happening is beneficial clearly for Facebook’s bottom line, but obviously not beneficial for the user experience.

PM: No, I completely agree with you. And we see it with Google now as well. And I’m, I’m sure other ones too. When we talk about this reorientation of production, right, you were talking about how we would want to reduce SUV production and private jets and fast fashion and increase the production of things that we actually want, or that we actually need in order to address these ecological and social crises that we have.

How do you see that reorientation of production taking place? Because I feel like on the one hand we could think of this as like this top down thing where it’s imposed upon us somehow, and people might get very frustrated with something like that. Or there can be other kind of more democratic means of approaching something like this. What is the vision you have for how we change how the economy works and the productive capacities that it has?

JH: I think that democracy is key here. Let me first just back up and point to something else, which is that when you say these things, people are like: Oh, that sounds like a totalitarian economy where you have some kind of shadowy elites kind of planning things. I’m like, mate, we actually already live in a totalitarian economy, where capital controls what gets produced. They’re the ones that get to decide how our labor and our resources are going to be mobilized to produce what for whose benefit and how the yields are distributed, et cetera, et cetera, is a deeply anti democratic system.

Yes, we have political democracy in many countries, but when it comes to the economic system, there’s not even the pretense of democracy. We effectively work in totalitarian institutions where we’re just told what to do. We have no say. And again, it’s the anti-democratic nature of capitalism. That is the main reason for the perverse production that we get. This is why we have production that is ecologically destructive and does not meet social needs. Because if it was more democratic, it would accomplish those things because we can all see what needs to be done.

PM: I feel like even on that point, it feels like we’ve been slowly seeing capital turn against political democracy, let alone economic democracy with the rise of the far right. And what we’ve been seeing in a lot of Western countries over the past number of years.

JH: Exactly. I think there’s major tensions between democracy and capitalism in almost every respect. Capital cannot abide the possibility that the masses, the working classes would be able to determine the basics of production. This is fundamentally antithetical to capital. That’s ultimately what we’re going to have to achieve. So, but to answer your question, the way I see it working is something like the citizens assemblies when it comes to national decision making. If you look at the citizens assemblies that have been convened officially in France and the UK and Spain, these have no teeth, they’re just experiments.

They’re official experiments, but they’re just experiments. And there’s been quite a lot of research done on them. And they’re fascinating to me because you have these people that are effectively randomly selected and represents the full diversity of the national demographics. And they very quickly arrive at the solutions that we’ve been discussing. They can very quickly build consensus around if we want to achieve social and ecological goals, this is what’s going to happen. We’re going to have to reduce this form of production. We need to increase this form of production. We need public finance for this, etc.

So it’s actually not difficult democratically to build consensus around this. People know what to do. And we also know this from empirical studies of people’s behavior under experimental conditions where they’re given democratic control over production and resource use. And what we see is that large majorities like 70% to 80% opt to organize production around wellbeing and ecological stability. This is our intrinsic tendency, which is totally the opposite from what we’re continually told, which is that humans are selfish. The reason we’re in this problem is because we just want quick buck. We’re willing to sabotage the future and other people to maximize their own gain.

This is all bullshit. People don’t actually behave this way under democratic conditions. We can easily build consensus about what needs to be done. And so I think that something that’s in control of public finance would allow us to have public banks, public investment mechanisms that have particular social and ecological objectives that are democratically ratified. We’re in this current moment where we need to scale up these certain kinds of ecological technologies and forms of production and social forms of production and scale down these other ones. Public finance can be used to do this. At least the scaling upside, the scaling downside can be done with credit guidance.

These are two critically important words that most people don’t know. Because this approach was actually used extensively in the middle of the 20th century, even by, say, the USA. The idea here is states are the ones that Create money and they can use that money to finance whatever they want under capitalism, they franchise that that power to commercial banks So then commercial banks are the ones that get to create money when they make loans. So effectively they’re issuing money and they issue money on the basis of profit. They issue money to commercial production on the basis of what is going to be most profitable. And so they’re allocating money on that basis.

Now, a credit guidance system can simply say, well, this is actually like a public good, the ability to create money. We’re, we’re franchising this to you, but we’re going to introduce some rules. You’re not allowed to make big investments in fossil fuels. You can make big investments, investments in renewable energy or electric train technology, whatever it might be. And so you can restrict flows of capital to undesirable sectors and incentivize flows of capital to important sectors.

And this is the basics of industrial policy which again, actually is exactly what China uses as well, which has been a big part of their ability to really rapidly scale up green technologies, and dominate that sector globally. I think that this is the kind of thinking we need to bring back in. Why just allow production to be dictated by capital and profitability, when we can very easily introduce democratically ratified rules to direct capital to where we want it to go? This is preferable, I I think. That’s quite a powerful approach and that could easily be implemented.

PM: I think so too. I feel really positive and hopeful about the idea of citizens assemblies and actually kind of giving that agency to people to decide how the economy should work, how production should work, what we actually want in this society, because I think That once you actually give people that agency, they can see through a lot of the kind of tech conveniences and stuff like that, that they’ve been given in order to distract from that general lack of agency that they have.

I feel like one piece that’s important to this as well is there is a certain strand of argument that says, Oh, the technologies are going to become so powerful that. The algorithms can just figure out how the economy is going to work and what production that we need. And, we don’t need people actually deciding these things, but I think that the approach with citizens assemblies is really to say, no, we might be able to use technology to help plan the economy, but ultimately those decisions over what kind of production we have and what we’re doing and what we’re producing is first and foremost, determined by people democratically, and then that shapes everything else.

JH: Yes, please. Because look, you can see immediately, it’s true. You could use AI to help plan an economy. This is really interesting plan, certain forms of production, what needs to be achieved, etc., etc.. But look, under our existing arrangement, this technology is immediately going to be used by capital to find forms of production that will maximize profitability.

And that’s exactly what we don’t need right now. What we need is this to be in the hands of people. right, democratically to shape our future economy in ways that are socially and ecologically beneficial. That’s critically important. So another piece I’ll, I’ll add to this is, okay, so I’ve described how how finance and planning on the national scale can be democratized or run more democratically.

I think also this should be happening at the firm level, we need to democratize firms. I think in a post capitalist economy, you can absolutely have private production. Okay. Clearly there’s going to be certain parts of the economy, like the social foundational economy, you’re going to want to decommodify and have that publicly provisions again, as democratically as possible. But I’m talking about public transits and healthcare and education and universal access to affordable housing, energy, clean water, etc, etc, right. Childcare, etc. But then, production and the rest of the economy where we’re producing, whatever, like watches and laptops and beer.

Clearly this can be done by private producers, private firms but they should be democratized. Now a democratic firm is able to make decisions about production that are not guided purely by profit. It can choose to organize production around what’s socially and ecologically beneficial because the workers or the community or whoever owns it are able to decide how the surplus should be invested to produce what. And I think that this is the basics of a post-capitalist firm. So people have this assumption that: Oh, okay; you want a post-capitalist economy. Does that mean everything is just run by the state? No, it just means that the objectives of production, whether in the public or the private sphere are democratically determined and democratically managed.

PM: I completely agree with that. And I think one of the other things that really resonated with me when I was reading about, you’re writing on degrowth and technology was not just this idea that by kind of taking power over production, we can possibly actually increase the technological progress that we have and the types of technologies that are socially beneficial because they won’t be guided by capital, but by our actual needs and what we actually need to build a better world, but beyond that, to also reorient how we think about technology itself, because that term has basically come to mean digital technologies, computers, particularly kind of really high energy intensive technologies, high tech sort of stuff. But actually that refers to a lot of mundane technologies that we often no longer think of as technologies themselves that can be very beneficial to creating a better world if we were to recognize the potential power that they can play.

JH: Absolutely. Look, we’ve been trained to think of technology as digital things are just really complex machines. And sometimes, simpler technologies are actually more powerful. And that should also be I’m not saying that complex machinery is bad at all. But that should also be part of our repertoire. So I mean, bicycles are an interesting one. Bicycles are an incredibly efficient machine for moving people around. And they’re also fun. And so our vision for a decarbonized transit system in urban areas should absolutely include bicycles as an integrated components of an efficient light rail or metro system. And this is actually what Barcelona is pioneering. The public bike system in Barcelona is just incredible. It’s extremely well organized, very efficient. The infrastructure is great. You can zoom around the city, as fast or faster than you can on public transit. And it’s just really fun. It’s just fun. And so this should be part of our repertoire as well.

And also when it comes to to agriculture. Agroecology is an incredibly advanced technology. It’s an advanced technology that has a lot of research that goes into it. Okay. Yes. It’s not necessarily very capital intensive. It’s the opposite actually, but is incredibly effective when it comes to regenerating soils and biodiversity, and improving yields, etc., etc., etc. But then the last thing I would add to this is also let’s just think about like social technologies as well. One of the main objectives we have when we talk about technological innovation is we want labor saving technology and that’s great. I’m also for that.

But then think about the power of things like public childcare system, or community kitchens. There’s a huge amount of labor that we’re all doing in our own houses, and our own families, individually replicating labor that could be done collectively, like childcare or like community kitchens, that can be done much more efficiently when it’s collectivized and also just makes it more fun and effective. And this is something that, by the way, the socialist struggles of the 20th century were very keen on. They recognize that things like public childcare and community kitchens were an incredible labor saving technology. That could liberate labor to do other kinds of things. And also, crucially, would be important for feminist objectives.

And so in addition to recognizing the power of technology and how in a post capitalist economy we can innovate better technologies, we would also be free also to explore and develop. social technologies along these lines. But right now we don’t get those things because public childcare and community kitchens are not profitable compared to supermarkets and restaurants. So in a post-capitalist scenario, we would be liberated to think more broadly about technological interventions that could improve our lives.

PM: I feel like this is such a key point too, because in the past few years we’ve seen right-wing politicians seizing on climate initiatives in order to say that this is what is driving costs up, this is making things more expensive that we can’t afford to address the climate crisis because if affordability issues and high inflation, and that these are a real key part of why that is happening. And part of that feels like, because a lot of the climate policies that we’ve been pursuing are focused more on, again, economic growth and trying to drive green growth rather than not just addressing the climate crisis, but also these broader social crisis that we face as well.

This feels like a key piece of the kind of vision or argument that is being laid out in that. Yes, we need to do these sorts of things too. We need to shift the way that production works. We need to think about the energy use that we have to address the climate crisis, but this also needs to be part of a broader campaign to give people democratic power over production, their lives, the economy. And linking that to making sure that we also address these key social needs to bring people along. This seems at the core of everything.

JH: Exactly. 100%. And I mean, the thing about decarbonization strategies and costs. Yeah. I mean, if your strategy is like, we’re just going to get everyone to buy an EV. There’s huge swathes of the population, even in rich countries that can’t afford this. Whereas public transit is something that can be done with a lot less energy, a lot less materials and make it free for people. This can be done. So I think this is crucial. And just generally, like we talk about the cost of living crisis as if this is something very difficult to solve. Look, one of the key proposals that you will see over and over again in degrowth scholarship, and obviously an eco socialist scholarship more broadly, which I see as, in some ways, like the broader discourse into which degrowth fits. Universal public services are crucial to this vision.

Universal public services ensure that we’re always producing in sufficient quantities, what we know to be essential to human wellbeing. The key things: education, healthcare, public transit, energy, water, housing, nutritious food, childcare, etc., etc. The core things that we know to be essential to a good life will always be produced in sufficient quantities and people would be guaranteed access to those high quality goods. The power of this, like why is this an ecological technology? It’s because this liberates us from growth dependency.

It means that regardless of what happens in the rest of the economy, whether you have an increase or decrease in aggregate production in the rest of the economy, you always have this core that is guaranteed, which means no one is going to ever suffer any negative effects to their livelihoods or access to essential resources. They’re decommodified. And so this intrinsically protects people against cost of living crises, but actively. directly reducing the cost of living. So these are very simple, straightforward solutions to the cost of living crisis that also allow us to have a more stable, more resilient economy that is not constantly in crisis every time there’s some fluctuation, some downward fluctuation in total production.

PM: I have one final question for you. I realized we’ve been talking kind of generally about these issues, often relating them to our experiences in Global North societies, but there’s a whole other key piece of this as well that is sometimes used to say, Oh, degrowth only thinks about what’s happening in the Global North and doesn’t think about how the global South still needs to grow as well.

How do you see this kind of playing out globally, this sort of vision for how this would work? And how does it ensure that people in the Global South also see their standard of living rise, rather than just kind of continuing these unequal relationships that we have today in our world?

JH: Totally. I’m so glad you asked about this because and I should have mentioned this right at the beginning because this is so crucial to addressing people’s misunderstandings. Degrowth is a proposition for rich countries, for the imperial core of the world economy, as these are the ones that have excess levels of energy and material use. In the Global South, actually, most countries specifically low and lower middle income countries under consume energy and materials. They actually need an increase in energy and material use in order to build out the necessary infrastructure for human developments and basic industrial capacity and things like that.

And so one of the reasons that there’s such widespread deprivation across the Global South right now is because a huge amount of the Global South’s productive capacity is effectively organized around servicing capital accumulation and consumption in the core. So land is devoted to producing sugar and cotton for Coca Cola and Zara. Their factories are producing consumer technologies for Microsoft and Apple. These are all capacities that could be organized around local human needs and social progress and human development and industrial output for the local economy, et cetera, but instead are effectively appropriated at artificially cheap prices for consumption in the core. There’s a drain of resources and productive capacity from the periphery to enable massive consumption in the core.

And so degrowth actually targets this precise problem. The rich countries have to scale down their use of our planet’s resources, thus liberating resources and energy in the Global South to be redirected around local development needs. Now, of course, in order to have that redirection occur, Global South economies need to have sovereign control over their own productive capacities, which right now they don’t have as a result of structural adjustment programs and the rules of international trade and finance, which restricts them from controlling their own productive capacities for their own needs. So, economic liberation must be achieved in the periphery so that such a redirection of resources can be achieved.

And this is exactly what, to a large extent, China has been doing quite effectively. They’re increasingly mobilizing production around what is necessary for their own national development. So that’s it. So basically like we should recognize degrowth not just as an ecological proposition, but as a global justice proposition, as an anti imperialist proposition. And I think that’s a critically important part of it. In fact, that is the reason I came to the degrowth scholarship in the first place. It was first through a reading of the world system dynamics and, secondarily as an ecological tool, but it really serves both purposes.

PM: I think that’s key, not only giving this agency to people within societies, whether those are in the Global North or Global South, to have greater control over their economies, their lives, but to fix these very unacceptable global inequalities that exist. Jason, it’s been really fantastic to dig into all this with you, to get through degrowth, to understand this better and its relationship with technology. Thanks so much for taking the time.

JH: My pleasure. Good to speak to you, Paris.