The Needless Strive for “Growth”

I was reading the other day about the Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, and his aims to reduce his workforce by implementing AI agents. The reason behind this is clear. Less staff, less cost, same result. For a business owner it’s a blatantly obvious goal as he, already being a multi-billionaire, strives to improve his margins and create more shareholder value.

It raises the question, when will it end? This is just one example of corporations doing all they can to shave off as much or as little as possible to boost profits. We have to ask, why? Society has become increasingly over-consuming, with everyone expecting whatever they want, when they want. This relentless pursuit for growth fuels this.  Everything has to be bigger, better and more easily accessible.

As society continues on this relentless path, cracks are beginning to show. Just like the portrait of Dorian Grey, on the outside everything looks shiny and polished, but under the surface we’re crumbling away. People will often be locked into the belief that growth policies are just “how things are”. But in reality, it’s a fundamentally unsustainable way of functioning in society. The losers in this system are both the groups suffering from growing inequality and our very own planet.

If things don’t change, I foresee a society which will eat itself to death, just as in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life – it’s only one more wafer thin mint, what’s the worst that could happen?

When it comes to growth policies, we have to look at their origin. It turns out our modern fixation on growth is relatively new. In the 1930s, as the Great Depression tore through the US, the economist Simom Kuznets developed national income accounting to help governments understand economic cycles. His work evolved into Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which quickly became the go-to measure of economic success.

As the Second World War came around, this metric’s popularity increased. GDP was used to set production targets and mobilise resources and became the ultimate policy goal. After the war, this became a global outlook and rising GDP became the primary association for prosperity.

But what we’ve forgotten are Kuznets’ warnings against equating GDP with well-being, noting that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred” from it alone. GDP ignores unpaid labour, inequality, and environmental damage, but still remains the dominant yardstick for progress.

I was reading an article the other day which stated how Robert Kennedy (not the one who’s driven mad by healthcare conspiracies) once said, “it measures everything…except that which makes life worthwhile.” I think this is the point. We’re fixated on GDP and growth, and as a result are missing the point of our human existence. Instead of social wellbeing, our success is measured by a chart growing in a linear direction. Look at every economy at the moment in Europe, and our own for that matter. The numbers fluctuate around pretty stagnant percentiles.

I think further to the ignorance of our social wellbeing and human development, the pursuit of growth and consuming more and more has another major issue. It’s obvious really, nothing can grow forever. We all reach a point in our life where we stop growing – for better or worse! Our body realises that it’s reached the point of where it needs to be and remains at a size. It’s sufficient.

Instead of following this, we just want more and more at faster and faster rates. What we can’t forget is that you can’t have infinite growth when we’re on a planet that is finite. Resources will run out, and as much as Musk and his gang of uber-billionaires are now looking to colonise Mars and mine asteroids, this is a nonsense for us common folk.

So, what’s the alternative? As frustrating as it is, calling for a global system change is a challenge. I think capitalism is going nowhere, and by the time we all realise a new system would be best, the planet will probably have been destroyed by the death of the Sun.

Currently, capitalism is thriving for all the wrong reasons. It’s enabled the super-rich to become mega-rich and continue to wreak havoc on our world. Whether that’s through exploitative mining in Africa or flying their private jets for a trip as long as walking down to the shop to pick up a pint of milk and a newspaper.

Why do we not use our capitalist system to put some constraints in? As the great George Monbiot said, “we need private sufficiency and public luxury”. The wealthy control the land, goods, and property, this doesn’t contribute to the common good. The top 1%’s carbon emissions are 175 times of the poorest 10%. Just let that sink in.

Countless people will defend the super-rich, without knowing them or them caring about you, when in reality they are destroying our planet and taking us for a ride. The capitalist way that we all of course love can remain in place but be done so with the pursuit towards “green growth”. We could divert our thinking towards innovation and technology to strengthen carbon capture and greener buildings. I’m sure that if a member of the emerging ‘broligarchy’ really wanted to, this could be something done with huge impact.

Of course, there is a more radical way we can turn this relentless, and somewhat pointless, pursuit of growth on its head. There is a phrase coined by Jason Hickel in his book Less is More called “degrowth”. This idea really resonates. Of course, just hearing this phrase sends shivers down the spines of not just a well-seasoned economist. It sounds wholly counterintuitive. Why on earth would we want to de-grow? Looking into it further though, it makes sense, and again, GDP is the issue here. We see these three letters as the main relation to social wellbeing and prosperity. As Hickel says, “nothing could be further from the truth”.

Capitalism sells itself as a system of abundance, but in reality, thrives on manufacturing scarcity. The Lauderdale Paradox argues that “private riches”, aka GDP, grow only when “public wealth” is diminished. By enclosing or destroying resources once freely available, capitalism forces people to pay for access and work for survival. Natural abundance is turned into profit and we’re all pushed into an arms race to access basic amenities.

Degrowth sounds a lot more harrowing than it actually is. It doesn’t mean calling for a total shutdown of the global economy, it just means downsizing. Like an individual who grows old and no longer needs to live in a family sized home, this idea calls for a focus on reduction and redistribution. It means taking away the fixation of always wanting more, and realising a lot of what’s available isn’t necessary.

I remember watching the TV the other day and saw an ad for some new brand of shampoo which stated how it removed micro metals which come out of shower heads. This was never a problem two years ago, was it? The same goes for technology like the iPhone. Each year, consumers are pressured to buy an almost identical product with the fear of not having the next best thing. If you look around your living room, you’re surrounded by items you don’t need, or hardly ever use.

Degrowth focuses less on the constant need to consume and grow and instead builds itself around common goods and ensuring we all have enough to live. If we really think about it, there’s more than enough to go around. Instead of us working in a state of panic to access common goods, we can open them back up to the masses. That means boosting investment into public services and social protections and reducing the fears of scarcity.

I think in the end, when we look back to Marc Benioff and what he’s doing with AI, it is just the latest symptom of the relentless drive for growth at any cost. We’re told this system creates abundance, but it survives through manufacturing scarcity. If we keep measuring success by GDP and shareholder value, we’ll keep burning through people and the planet alike.

Degrowth isn’t about going back to the stone age, it’s more about reclaiming what actually makes life worthwhile such as security, community, and shared prosperity. If we continue on our current path and little by little keep consuming more wafer-thin mints, it’s only a matter of time until we ensure our own destruction.