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Hello, I’m Eve. Readers will disagree with this post on both analytical and practical grounds. First, let’s talk about the lack of authority economists have to debate climate change analysis, given their acceptance of William Nordhaus’s destructive work and their appalling justification of it by awarding it a Nobel Prize. The authors are in an extremely precarious position to criticize the quality of degrowth research, given that they have praised the terrible quality of research that suits their tastes. Steve Keen, The weakening of his argument.
The article blatantly ignores that the solutions to the accelerating climate crisis are simply not commensurate with the scale of the problem, it takes the position that the needs of the economy take priority over the future of the biosphere and the medium-term survival of anything even remotely representative of modern civilization (which, perhaps, is not an achievable outcome, but should at least be recognized as a goal), and it also implicitly ignores that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
By Ivan Savin and Jeroen van den Bergh. Originally published in Vox EU
The past decade has seen a plethora of publications on degrowth as a strategy to confront environmental and social problems. This column reviews their content, data, and methods. The authors conclude that the majority of studies are opinion rather than analysis; only a few use quantitative or qualitative data and even fewer use formal modeling; the former and latter types tend to focus on small or unrepresentative sample sizes; most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking integration with insights from the policy evaluation and environmental/climate policy literatures; and, of the few studies on public support, the majority and most robust ones conclude that degrowth strategies and policies are socially and politically unfeasible.
Over the last decade, numerous studies have been published in scientific journals proposing “degrowth” strategies as an alternative to green growth (Tréquer et al. 2012; Tol and Lyons 2012; Aghion 2023). The concept of degrowth refers to downsizing the economy to address environmental and social issues. The topic has little academic standing (yet), but has received considerable attention in the media and in the public sphere in general. Take a look at two conferences taking place in the European Parliament:
To assess the scientific quality of degrowth thinking, we conducted a systematic literature review of 561 published studies that used the term in their title (Savin and van den Bergh 2024). This allowed us to determine the proportion of studies that provided conceptual discussion and subjective opinions versus data analysis or quantitative modelling. Furthermore, we examined whether the study addressed climate/environmental policy, including policy support/feasibility, and whether it was well embedded in the broader literature in the field.
Distribution of studies (time, country, scientific method or not)
Figure 1 shows that the number of studies on degrowth has increased over time. As the red line shows, ten years ago, almost all studies in this trend explicitly used the term “degrowth” in the title, but more recently, perhaps to reduce resistance, more studies have used the more vague term “postgrowth.”
The majority of studies (almost 90%) are opinion rather than analytical: 9 studies used theoretical models (1.6% of the sample), 8 studies used empirical models (1.4%), 31 studies performed quantitative data analysis (5.5%), and 23 studies performed qualitative data analysis (e.g. interviews) (4.1%). As Figure 3 shows, there is no clear trend indicating an increasing proportion of studies employing specific methods.
Figure 1 Temporal distribution of academic publications on degrowth
Note: The histogram shows the frequency of studies by year, and the red line shows the number of studies that used “de-growth” (rather than “post-growth”) in the title.
Most of the authors in our sample are affiliated with institutions in Western Europe and the United States (Figure 2), with the UK, Spain and Germany leading by a large margin. This is consistent with previous findings that there is little support for degrowth in the Global South (King et al. 2023).
Figure 2 Geographic frequency of author affiliations
Figure 3 Time patterns of the proportion of studies using one of the four methods
Focus on small samples and lack of a systematic view of the economy
In examining 54 studies using qualitative or quantitative data analysis, we found that they tend to have small samples or focus on special cases, such as 10 interviews with 11 respondents on local growth discourse in the small Swedish town of Alingsås (Buhr et al. 2018), or two sites in a “rural-urban squatter” in Collserola, a hilly area of Barcelona (Cattaneo and Gavaldà 2010). This can easily lead to unrepresentative or even biased insights. To some extent, this weakness of empirical research on degrowth is understandable. The idea of degrowth is far removed from reality and has never been seriously implemented, which makes proper empirical research a difficult task. Past experiences such as communist countries (e.g. Cuba), low-growth countries (e.g. Japan), or economic decline due to COVID-19 do not provide convincing examples of degrowth. Perhaps the best that can be achieved is stated preference surveys and behavioral experiments. This should be done on sufficiently large samples, but studies on degrowth tend to lack this ambition. The few studies that use larger datasets tend not to collect them themselves but to rely on data of a general nature, such as the European Values Study (Paulson and Büchs 2022). The problem is that these studies do not explicitly investigate degrowth, but ask general questions about growth and the environment that are open to interpretation (Drews et al. 2018). As a result, related studies reach overly optimistic conclusions about support for degrowth (Paulson and Büchs 2022). This is supported by some solid studies by psychologists that found that most participants in experiments tended to react emotionally negatively to messages advocating radical degrowth, and that many perceived degrowth strategies as a threat. Moreover, previous studies that attempt to clearly distinguish between different positions on growth and the environment (e.g. Drews et al. 2019 ) have found more support for “growth”, i.e. skepticism of or disregard for GDP ( van den Bergh, 2011 ), than degrowth, not only among academic researchers but also the general public.
Since degrowth strategies tend to be radical, i.e. they propose major changes to socio-economic systems, it is crucial to have sufficient insight into their systemic and macro-economic impacts. Unfortunately, many studies propose to conduct large-scale socio-economic experiments with large socio-economic risks without getting the full picture. Most quantitative and qualitative studies focus on small-scale problems that are usually unrepresentative and have very small sample sizes, making it impossible to draw conclusions about systemic impacts. Of the 561 studies we reviewed, only 17 that used theoretical or empirical modeling shed some light on these broader impacts. Some of them draw rather pessimistic conclusions in this regard. For example, Hardt et al. (2020) find that the shift to a labor-intensive service sector, which is part of many degrowth proposals, leads to only a small reduction in overall energy use due to indirect energy use. Malmaeus et al. (2020) also conclude that universal basic income, a popular theme in the degrowth literature, is less compatible with local, labour-intensive and self-sufficient economies than with global, capital-intensive and high-tech economies.
It is worth noting that much of the research labeled “degrowth” is not original but rather a relabeling of existing research, such as shorter working hours, the circular economy, home retrofitting, the bioeconomy, etc. This is ironic given appeals for “decolonization” within the degrowth community (Deschner and Hurst 2018).
Why is there so much poor quality research and why is self-criticism necessary?
One may wonder why so many low-quality degrowth studies were published. One explanation is that about 100 papers in our sample were published in special issues (14 in total), while another 18 were published by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), which has been accused of being a predatory publisher (Ángeles Oviedo-García 2021). Another possible explanation is that many reviewers are selected based on their sympathy for degrowth (as shown by their past publications endorsing degrowth) rather than their expertise in the application of methods. Overall, the journal peer review process for many degrowth studies was likely more lenient than the average academic paper. As a result, published research on degrowth is dominated by ideology and lacks scientific quality.
By noting some weaknesses in the way degrowth research is conducted, our review suggests the need for a healthy degree of self-criticism and humility in the degrowth community. Research should become more ambitious in terms of the selection of case studies and ensure that local or regional scale studies are complementary and representative. This will allow for generalization or extension of research findings and for reaching a reliable global picture. To further contribute to this goal, more studies of a systemic nature are also needed to evaluate the relative role of scale and substitution and efficiency, and to determine indirect economic, social and environmental impacts, especially energy/carbon rebounds. Secondly, for degrowth research to be taken more seriously, it is essential to set higher standards for sample size and representativeness in empirical studies, to investigate public and stakeholder support for degrowth ideas, and to seek synergies with existing research fields (e.g. economics, psychology, policy research), because these fields offer rich insights into the design of effective, efficient and equitable environmental/climate policies that can be expected to have sufficient public support.
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