My concern is not simply that these indicators point in a very bad direction, but that they do so unnoticed. I think I am part of the majority who read nothing in the news about the worryingly earlier passage of Overshoot Day this year.
Similarly, did anyone read about the International Degrowth Conference in Pontevedra, Spain, in mid-June? Not even the official website reported on the conference outcomes. My quick search for press coverage came up blank. For a global movement aimed at shifting us away from unsustainable consumerism and getting governments to reconsider their blind pursuit of gross domestic product growth, the silence speaks volumes.
Among mainstream economists, for whom GDP growth has, for more than a century, been the aspiration of governments across the world, talk of the need for degrowth has a heretical feel about it, and the concept was always set to be controversial.
At the heart of degrowth was a frustration with the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of progress, which took no account of crime, resource depletion, housework, volunteerism or the value of higher education, but at the same time measured prison-building or defence spending as a positive. Degrowthers chafed that pollution was counted twice in GDP measures – first upon creation and again when cleaned up.
Many have dabbled with such indicators, including a team at the University of Maryland’s Quality of Life Initiative. Baptist University’s Claudio O. Delang and Yi Hang Yu took a GPI measure to Hong Kong from 1968 to 2010 and found that while most countries saw a steady GPI decline, Hong Kong’s had risen.
The uncomfortable reality is that there is strong common sense in the need to improve how we measure our economic progress. Sadly, GPI has provided no silver bullet. And the degrowth movement seems to be contributing little. In March this year, Alessio Terzi at Cambridge University came to a depressing conclusion that degrowth is a politically impractical dead end: “The most degrowthers can hope to achieve is to prod a privileged few toward more sustainable consumption habits.”
“Avoiding a climate catastrophe demands a multifaceted strategy comprising multiple solutions. But degrowth is not one of them,” he concluded. The imperative to cut sharply our consumption of global resources and to create a measure akin to GDP that measures human well-being more effectively is as pressing as ever. Sadly, those we have so far created are going largely unnoticed.
David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades