Let’s Ditch Degrowth
“Degrowth is a depressive ideology, a paralytic that denies the possibility of real progress,“ it's time we ditched it.
Jordan Taylor for The Up Wing, June 19th, 2026
“Degrowth is a depressive ideology, a paralytic that denies the possibility of real progress, much like real depression. And like real depression, a good countermeasure is to just get off the couch and do something!” — Jordan Taylor
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A little while ago economist Thomas Piketty, author of the impressive but misguided tome ‘Capital in The 21st Century’ issued a manifesto for his visionary new world entitled the Global Justice Project. Now, it's important to note at this point that just as a country with ‘democratic’ in the name probably isn't, you should probably be cynical of any political movement with ‘justice’ in the title.
You know that something bad is coming with a name like that, and so it is. Piketty and his team, in an effort that took two years, sought to write up a solution to global inequality and climate change, presumably having decided that one or the other was an insufficient challenge on its own. A whole team for two years! With a name like ‘World Inequality Lab’, what do you think they came up with?
With the shiny roster of clean technologies coming into being (or being polished-up after decades in storage) you'd expect a technology-&-growth focused approach to decarbonization, right? Perhaps a vision of a world united by clean, fast, continent-skirting maglev rail? Miniature fast neutron reactors for every rural township? Genetically tailored algae in vast briny grow-beds bringing us many times the protein in a fraction of the land, freeing up our rural hillsides for vast growths of new wild forest? Maybe new urban areas constructed around the huge potential of self-driving electric cabs? At the very least, surely his new vision would cover continent-spanning high voltage DC transmission, connecting the cheap solar in the West with the urban nightlife of the East?
Not a bit of it! His vision was all about wealth taxes and redistribution, of course. Taking from the rich countries and giving to poor ones through a vast grinding common global tax system. Benevolence by bureaucrat. Sounds lovely. It's just another flatulent note in the endless turgid symphony that is ‘degrowth’, a weird collection of guilt-minded ideologies that aims to deliberately impoverish us for the sake of the planet, or equality, or the lesser spotted garden spindle-shrew. Or something.
“It's just another flatulent note in the endless turgid symphony that is ‘degrowth’, a weird collection of guilt-minded ideologies that aims to deliberately impoverish us for the sake of the planet, or equality, or the lesser spotted garden spindle-shrew.”
The usual premise is a managed shrinking of the rich world's economy in the service of reducing emissions, or improving global inequality, or both. How it's achieved is frequently left to the imagination but could include punitive transfer taxes, lowered maximum working hours, carbon budgets or just good old fashioned central planning. It yields such joys as less time working, less stuff to own, combined with more time spent communally hand-washing your clothes and getting to know your neighbours.
I know, fellow parents; that sounds unappealing to anyone with a horde of little people. Or who values their time in any way at all. This is why I often suspect that degrowth, which is gaining weird popularity in Europe these days, is a product of the embittered and the childless… except that Piketty himself has three kids. Maybe he's just confident that no politician would ever be suicidal enough to act on his recommendations: Buy my book, but for God's sake don't take my advice!
And yet in other places politicians really are queueing at the altar of degrowth. In the UK a restrictive planning system joins arms with a national ‘carbon budget’, and prominent politician Ed Miliband just proposed to restrict the sale of underfloor heating systems. Comfort, it seems, is for me, not for thee.
But putting aside the mechanics of how anyone would enforce ‘degrowth’ on a population, there is the real question of why anyone would want it in the first place.
On the one hand you could argue that it's just good old-fashioned materialism: In many parts of the developed world, Western Europe and the UK in particular, we live in an environment where economies in the last twenty years have been so sluggish you'd have to poke them with a stick to see if they're alive at all. This is exacerbated by a housing market where under-development and low interest rates have met together, joined hands and turbocharged house prices to such an extent that many young people have lost hope of owning a house altogether. And if you're in that bucket, I forgive you for wanting to flip the Monopoly board and play another game entirely.
Another grassy shoot of the degrowth movement could be simple envy. If you know others with big cars and expensive houses and you don't have that, it'd be comforting to believe that they're somehow morally deficient. You, the impoverished social media addict eating noodles in a shoebox, are much more righteous and climate-friendly! Maybe, but I don't think it's either of these things alone.
I suspect the main culprit is linked to an ancient Greek philosophical principle Telos, which could be thought of as your ‘inherent goal’. We are thinking apes and, like all creatures, we need to know where we are and where we're going. Our telos should orient us in the world; a compass showing true North, guiding us to where we need to be. Tragically, I think millions of us have lost it.
For the directionless there is always parenthood and bringing new life into this world. Failing that there's religion, which offers a sort of doctrinal participation prize. Failing that there used to be the colonies and failing even that you could always choose to forget it all and join the French foreign legion. Alas the modern world has stripped a lot of these options away.
That's not merely the fault of modernity (the fertility collapse is far vaster and more terrible than that), and it's not just the fault of secularism or liberalism either, but they're all linked. Today's world has countless millions of childless, secular, directionless people stuck in societies where the wealth always seems slightly out of reach and the underlying message is “you should always feel a little bit guilty”.
Don't get me wrong: Liberalism is a wonderful thing, and individual liberty is a civilizational triumph, but perhaps we were too sanguine about letting people pull their sense of purpose from the vacuum without a cultural framework.
Because it turns out that's really difficult!
You can be anything that you want to be… but we won't tell you what you have to be. That's the bargain. You're on your own. And so, staggering slightly and punch-drunk, the home of liberalism seems to have stumbled onto its own self-destruct sequence and is pondering pressing the big red button. It's marked ‘degrowth’.
Degrowth would break the West. It's definitionally illiberal and undemocratic, because you need a huge lever of control to stop people making things better for themselves and their children, and that requires enforcement. It's an ideology of hard paternalism, delivering poverty to cleanse the soul, for your own good. And it really is about cleansing the soul, because degrowth occupies the place in the mind that the telos should. It's a demi-religious urge, bringing meaning to howling chaos, and if you doubt this consider that almost every degrowth movement has designs on your diet. Restricting food consumption is a religious act. Hell, it’s practically monastic.
“Degrowth would break the West. It's definitionally illiberal and undemocratic, because you need a huge lever of control to stop people making things better for themselves and their children, and that requires enforcement.”
I'm not sure you can argue someone out of such an insane belief, because you can't use logic to get someone out of a position that they didn't use logic to get into. But how do you stop people becoming weird degrowthers in the first place? One method would be: Just add hope. Degrowth is a depressive ideology, a paralytic that denies the possibility of real progress, much like real depression. And like real depression, a good countermeasure is to just get off the couch and do something!
Except here that doesn't mean “go for a run” but “build and grow an economy”, which is a bit more difficult, although at least you can do it in the rain. A good first start would be to tear down the absurd planning restrictions that choke off normal construction and start developing our world again. Whether that's by open-minded zoning, like in Japan, or something more laissez-faire. We shouldn't have to please disinterested NIMBYs or prove ‘biodiversity net gain’ just to build bridges and houses. The lesser spotted pygmy garden shrew isn't that important.
Maybe that way we can get some semblance of vitality back, grow some prosperity and give our young people somewhere to call their own so they can start a family and avoid the path of millennial nihilism. There are greater things in life to aspire to than being equal, or lowering your carbon footprint. These are the flaccid goals of a dullard. And there are greater goals that all of society could pursue too, because not everyone has kids or a company intent on flying people to Mars. -Although, come to think of it, colonising Mars would be a good idea. Something that massive would drive the nihilism out of anyone.
Or conquering fusion, or cleaning the world's drinking water, or making new cities from scratch, reclaiming Doggerland or building the tower of Babylon. It doesn't even have to make sense or money, just be capable of supplying a dream. Elon Musk sold a dream of intelligence in the heavens and the conquest of space and now he's worth a trillion buckaroos, after all. There's power in myth.
So to hell with the degrowthers and their weird alliance with the spreadsheet rationalists! Our big problem is not a surplus of vision, so tear the blinkers off and pull your nose, wetly, from your own navel so you can see the horizon again. Then find your telos, hold up your compass, and chart a path. To somewhere bizarre.
This op-ed was first published on June 16th, 2026, in the excellent Substack, Incautious Optimism, by Jordan Taylor.
Incautious Optimism
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