📉 🔙 Another terrible degrowth argument

Market capitalism works pretty well. Deal with it.

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

“Growth = Exploitation” is the basic thesis offered by a group of degrowth scholars who claim our planet can no longer afford the rapacious capitalist rat race. The short new paper, “On the Nature of Economic Growth: The Perspective of Political Ecological Economics,” portrays capitalism as a daisy chain of plutocratic plunder or “surplus by domination”: Companies (and the governments that back them) pull cheap labor, free water, and untaxed carbon from the commons, pocket some spoils, then invest the rest in an even bigger round of extraction.

The image argues that economic surplus is primarily extracted through domination— via exploitation, appropriation, and cost-shifting of human and natural work —and innovation, and that this surplus sustains both production and elite-controlled social systems while generating waste and inequality.

Growth, they contend, is less a tide that lifts all boats than a rising flood of exploitation and emissions disguised by slick PR. As they write, from both a Marxist and decolonialist perspective, “Growth is both a material process of surplus extraction and re-investment and a hegemonic story told by the ruling class to dress private interests as common benefits.”

The proposed cure: A planned reduction in overall production and consumption —especially in wealthy economies, of course — aimed at reducing environmental harm and social inequality. What’s more, this centrally managed retreat would be paired with new forms of economic accounting that measure not just profits or GDP, but also ecological costs (like tons of CO₂ emissions) and socially essential but unpaid labor (such as caregiving), making visible the hidden exploitation that fuels capitalist growth.

Yes, some people actually think like this. And that’s unfortunate, given the utter misunderstanding of a) how the world works and b) why some countries get richer and healthier over time. The degrowth story, however dressed up in academic language, totally misses how modern prosperity actually happened and the proper lessons to draw from the Great Acceleration and Enrichment.