Degrowth Is Coming for Us

And sooner than we might think. In fact, degrowth is happening right now.

But you have to see clearly. We recently talked about seeing [Futurists and Seeing 2026] what is actually happening divorced from official paradigms, narratives, marketing, and related propaganda. Let’s try a little seeing here around three ways in which degrowth is already here:

Business, government, educators, etc. are increasingly off-loading things they used to do for the customer, over to the customer. They cut their own costs by having the customer do the work instead. From pumping our own gas several decades ago to self-checkout to booking our own travel, buying your ticks at the movie kiosk, signing up, claims processing, booking appointments, home testing kits, signing up for classes, do-it-yourself assembly, bussing our tables, being sent to help forums, and then over to YouTube. in an automated portal. Or we are sent to customer help forums to find answers to our problems, that are most likely not there. You get the idea. This example highlights that what counts as growth is part of the problem. Many have pointed out that non-paid work doesn’t show up in the growth figures. What we’re suggesting here is that the share of non-paid work is increasing … and iIt won’t show up in the growth figures, so it actually looks like degrowth. We’ll put in a pin in the idea that “growth is really an inaccurate and unhelpful framing” for later.

My favorite recent “money grab” was the NFT craze epitomized by the Bored Apes. I recall doing some project work on NFTs at the time, and the team kept wondering what we were missing. It seemed ridiculous … surely we must be missing it? Alas, no. How about legalizing drugs? Some money there. Far more lucrative is legalized gambling — whether outright gambling or the pretend form of prediction markets. These numbers, temporarily at least grow the economy, but they demonstrate a lack of truly useful new growth areas. Is it really growth to pull in previously illegal activities and make them legal? [NOTE: I was tempted to put the LLM version of “AI” here, as the hype machine is in its full glory, but a plausible case can be made that someday “real” growth might emerge from this … if there is a real breakthrough.]

The most obvious one the ecological economists and most clear-eyed people can see is that using up non-renewable resources and destroying ecosystems — which shows up as GDP growth — is in fact a draw-down of our accounts. Despite all the evidence and effort, this frog continues to boil.

Three major degrowth trends (there are more). As a reader of this blog, you likely can “see” it. But most of your clients cannot or will not. They may refuse to. And not take kindly to those delivering such a message. So we have to be thoughtful about how we use this knowledge. Shouting from the rooftops is probably not the way to go [but probably helpful to have some of this too]. We’ll talk more in a future post about how to position a provocative topic like degrowth with audiences who are not ready for it. – Andy Hines