De-growing employment

In this episode, we explore some of the economic and social implications around much-needed ‘de-growth’

One of my backup hard-drives has failed, so I wander down-town to the computer-store to get a replacement. It’s a big place, part of a big national chain, and it’s a maze of shelves and shelves and more shelves that are all just stuffed full of big, shiny, expensive stuff.

Tempting, of course. All those so-desirable so-special-seeming shiny toys. Very tempting…

Yet that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s just temptation, lots of stuff that I might want, for sure, but there’s no actual need. And as I’ve found out the hard way, in most cases the reality is that if I do buy yet another of these shiny toys, I don’t actually get round to using it. A scary amount of stuff in my house sitting around in boxes that I haven’t even opened yet, that I’d bought for a project or plan for something I’d likewise like to do, but reality is that I probably never will. Oh well.

Which, given how severe the constraints are these days on my time and budget and more, for me that kind of buying definitely sits in that good ol’ bracket of Not A Good Idea…

For others, though, maybe not so much - or so it seems, anyway. In the photo it might seem quiet, but the place is usually heaving, and most people there seem to have plenty of money to spare. A lot of jobs there, too: at least twenty full-time sales-staff on that one floor alone, and no doubt plenty more in the warehouse off to one side and in management and the like on the floor above. All keeps the economy going and all that, doesn’t it?

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Or maybe not?

That’s because these days there ere are real concerns that we’ve made our global economy so dependent on getting people to be as wasteful as possible - a literal ‘economy of waste’ - that we’re increasingly at risk of consuming the world into oblivion. Which would definitely be Not A Good Idea, on a truly global scale…

Maybe we need an urgent rethink about this?

And, more important, putting that rethink into action?

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One obvious question to ask, perhaps, is this one from YouTube channel DW Planet A, in the title of their video ‘What if we stopped making so much stuff?’. And sure, yes, we need to ‘de-growth’ so many aspects of the overall economy - absolutely no question about that, in terms of future sustainability and survivability at a global scale. And some of those ‘de-growth’ aspects are happening anyway - for example, in some countries such as Russia and Japan, the natural birth-rate is already dropping below the replacement-rate, meaning that the population is ‘de-growing’ all on its own. That part is all fair enough, as long as no-one is imposing those choices onto them from outside, as in classic genocide-‘eugenics’ and the like.

But it gets complicated real quick once we think about ‘de-growth’ in a bit more depth. If we de-grow the flow of stuff that’s made up from mining all over the place that’s then churned out in factories that goes onto ships and planes and trucks to go into those shops that then clutters everyone’s homes and eventually ends up in landfill, then what’s going happen in all the intermediate stages along the way?

The short-answer is that as we de-grow all of that activity, we also de-grow everything else - perhaps most noticeably, de-growing employment. A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that that could easily be as much as half of the entire workforce by the time all of those cascading effects onto other areas of work play out. And in a money-based possession-economy, that’s a huge number of people suddenly without any income, and hence no way to buy what they do need - yet since the tax-revenue at every stage will also be de-growing at the same rate, the welfare-payments system would likewise collapse at the same rate too. It doesn’t take much effort to think through what would happen under those circumstances: describing it as ‘civil-chaos’ would likely be an understatement…

So we’re kind of caught on the horns of a dilemma here. On one side, we must ‘de-growth’ the economy, before it kills us all; but on the other side, we’re stuck with an economic model that depends on infinite growth.

Looks like there’s no way out of that dilemma, doesn’t it?

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Actually, there is a way out. Maybe the only survivable way out that there is.

But even daring to look at it is going to scare the proverbial out of most people, for a while. Until they actually do look at it.

And the way out is this: both sides of that dilemma arise from the current global not-economic ‘economy’ being based on possession. So drop the possession.

Instead, shift to that is already known and proven to actually work over not just a few hundreds of years, not just few thousands, but tens of thousands of years. Which is to base the economics on responsibility.

Or, to be more precise, structured, systematic, mutually-interlocking responsibilities.

Because if we do that, it sidesteps all of the dilemma, and all of its delusions about ‘rights of possession’ and the like. Which gets us out of the mess.

It really is as simple as that.

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What’s not simple is how to make the change. But we can talk about in more detail at some other time.

Right now, the key point is that there is a way forward to make the economy work, and make the economy sustainable, without de-growing employment. Let’s start again from there.

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