The Surprising Message That Made a British Economist a Celebrity

One night in 2009, ecological economist Tim Jackson was walking home in London when his phone rang. The prime minister, he learned, had gotten wind of Jackson’s latest report and gone ballistic.

Jackson had spent the last 18 months writing a report arguing that, on a finite planet, economic growth must also stay within limits. Instead of accepting endless growth as the standard of human flourishing, Jackson and his colleagues at the U.K. Sustainable Development Commission tried to describe what a different sort of world, and different sort of prosperity, might look like. 

Jackson knew upending a foundational creed of modern economics would upset people. At a public meeting about Jackson and his colleagues’ work, a Treasury official declared that they wanted to return to living in caves.

But when Jackson picked up the phone that evening, it was just days before a G20 summit in London on how to rebound from the global financial crisis. A report questioning growth, Prime Minister Gordon Brown seemed to feel, could be an embarrassment. 

A BBC interview with Jackson scheduled for the next morning was canceled. The other spots on a planned media blitz also evaporated. Jackson wondered whether the government had sabotaged the report, and assumed it would sink without a trace. 

Yet Prosperity Without Growth? became the most downloaded report in the SDC’s history. Less than a year later, a publisher released a book version that sold out its first print run within weeks. Jackson began to get speaking invitations from around the world. From asset managers to environmental activists, economists in Indonesia to diplomats at the United Nations, all sorts of people were intrigued by his work. 

These days, when Jackson gets phone calls from aides to national leaders, the tone is different. Last year, he received an impromptu invitation for a private meeting with the president of Ireland, who had been influenced by his writing on the ecological limits to growth. The book has now been translated into 17 languages. 

Jackson’s increasing prominence reflects a growing mainstream interest in degrowth economics. Japanese author Kohei Saito published a surprise bestseller on degrowth in 2020; the 2023 Beyond Growth Conference at the European Parliament in Brussels was dubbed the “Woodstock of beyond growth”; earlier this summer, a professor from the business school at Cambridge University defended degrowth in the Harvard Business Review. 

Such interest has provoked predictable sniping from publications such as The Economist, where degrowth is lazily conflated with Soviet-era oppression. “Green growth” supporters and degrowthers tend to agree that high-affluence lifestyles are unsustainable given current technologies. But otherwise they largely differ. Green growthers say degrowthers are politically utopian, accusing them of lacking a clear policy agenda; degrowthers say green growthers are technologically utopian, accusing them of having excessive faith that we will develop radically sustainable technologies fast enough to stay within the planetary boundaries that scientists say are critical to Earth’s stability and resilience. 

Jackson prefers the term “post growth,” which he finds less polarizing than degrowth. His 2021 book, Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, explores the historical and philosophical sources of our obsession with growth. In a society that matures beyond a growth obsession, he argues, people will spend less time chasing the buzz of consumerism and status, and more time in “high-flow, low-impact activities,” such as sports, creative activity, friendships, relationships, and contemplative practices.

Rather than constraining human potential, Jackson suggests, a post-growth society would free us to express it more fully, devoting ourselves to enduring and meaningful pleasures. This vision has such appeal that its apparent supporters now include consultants to some of the world’s most growth-obsessed and polluting companies.   

On a recent June afternoon, I walked with Jackson to the gleaming glass tower housing the London headquarters of the global consulting firm Ernst & Young. The firm had invited Jackson, who advises its New Economy Unit, to comment on a new exhibit they had created.

We were ushered into a dark, low-ceilinged room flanked by screens. The premise of the installation was that people were video calling from the future. Each screen represented one of four possible futures: Business as Usual, Collapse, Constrain, and Transform. 

Bullet points and bits of data flashed on the screens. In the “Business as Usual” future, the global population was 9.5 billion and warming was three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Market-driven adoption of energy transition technologies had proven inadequate. Food and water crises devastated vulnerable nations, triggering mass migration. Local conflicts and military coups surged, international cooperation fragmented, and world war loomed. In an attempt to give this general hellscape some human specificity, an A.I.-generated image of a woman spoke in a quivering voice about always needing to run her air conditioner and purifier, watching her savings dwindle, and feeding her child vitamins and supplements rather than fresh produce. 

The sense that we were watching a budget knockoff of the dystopian show Black Mirror only deepened with the “Collapse” scenario. After some text summarizing the accelerating feedback loops between climate collapse, pandemics, and financial meltdowns, gunshots sounded in the background as the grainy image of a woman hiding in a basement told us it was hot and her child was sick. She alluded darkly to “water wars” and looting. 

In the “Constrain” future, humanity limited the temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, but at a cost: Governments rationed goods, invested heavily in geo-engineering, and generally sacrificed freedoms to manage scarcity and prevent collapse. A large surveillance camera hovered in a corner of the screen, in case we’d missed the authoritarian overtones. A male A.I. face recounted with quaking voice how he and his wife had lost their jobs at an energy company after it was nationalized; he mentioned the “blue sky riots,” explaining that the sky had been white for years after a botched geo-engineering project by India.

Only one of the four futures was positive. In the “Transform” scenario, people in the mid-2020s confronted the polycrisis of our time, making radical changes that kept projected warming by 2100 to 1.5 degrees Celsius. A smiling A.I. face in Cape Town described the joys of having time to play soccer with his nephew. However clumsily sketched, the future resembled the “high-flow, low-impact” one Jackson imagined. The protagonists of this transformation, however, seemed to be business leaders. “The business world,” the text informed us, had responded to crisis by “investing heavily in climate mitigation upfront, collaborating and innovating in new ways.” The word “government” did not appear.

When the last short video ended, no one spoke for a long moment. Seeming to mistake embarrassed silence for deep emotion, an Ernst & Young employee gazed compassionately into our eyes. After some desultory conversation, people trickled out of the exhibit, and I chatted with Ernst & Young’s Gareth Jenkins, head of “Creative and Proposition.” I asked if the Constrain scenario had meant to equate any regulation of business with authoritarianism. “We’re not saying regulation is bad; it’s really important. But we have to be careful that it’s done democratically,” Jenkins said.

In that case, I wondered, would Ernst & Young support the nationalization or phased closures of oil companies, so long as these decisions were democratic? “Are you asking me as Gareth or as an E & Y employee? As the latter, I can’t say yes, since oil companies are among our clients,” Jenkins said.

It was not surprising that a corporate futurology exercise would avoid concrete policy proposals, gesturing instead toward salvation by unspecified business heroism. Yet behind these predictable elements are notes of radicalism. Even the “four futures” framing echoed the title of a 2015 book by a Jacobin editor on life after capitalism. A recent Ernst & Young report criticizing financial myopia, short-termism, and overconsumption reads at points like a post-growth manifesto. “In the pursuit of growth, the global economy has allowed unacceptable environmental trade-offs, ignored important drivers of social wellbeing, and fed an ever-widening wealth and power gap,” the authors write. Degrowth and ecological economics are favorably mentioned. During a summer in the U.K. when the soon-to-be-elected Labour Party was declaring sustained economic growth its “first mission,” and the “only route to improving the prosperity of our country and the living standards of working people,” it made a surreal juxtaposition. 

Over green tea that afternoon, Jackson reflected on what we had seen. “There are good people inside the beast,” he said of Ernst & Young, noting that only one of the four future scenarios was positive. While he appreciated this sober realism, he also noted the slippage between regulation and authoritarianism. And he saw another issue: the risk of fear-induced paralysis. “When you invite that kind of existential fear, people sometimes think, ‘I’m just gonna forget about it. Don’t frighten me when there’s nothing I can do.’”

Jackson thinks there are many things we can do, though he tends to present particular policy ideas as partial approximations of deeper necessary shifts. Health care is an instructive case: He supports investment in better wages for all care providers and universal, free access to care. Yet without more fundamental changes, he thinks we’re fighting an unwinnable battle. “Health is being undermined consistently by the lifestyles that we live, and the vested interests of the people that are creating those lifestyles are preventing us from living healthy lifestyles, because they’re profiting from tragedy,” he told me. 

In the last few years, this dynamic became personal for Jackson. His next book makes two basic arguments: Health is a better proxy for flourishing than wealth, and so provision of care rather than creation of growth is the basic task of an economy. While writing, he began having unusual aches and pains, and blood tests indicated type 2 diabetes. “I suddenly found myself an example of what I was talking about,” he said, noting that the baseline level of junk sold in restaurants and stores made the default choices a toxic mix of processed foods and refined sugars. 

Ecologists often note the perversity of a system in which both creating problems and (partially) remedying them count as growth. In the classic example, one company pollutes a river, another tries to mitigate the mess. Both boost gross domestic product, but the loss to ecosystems is ignored. In the case of health, humans are the river: Walk into a supermarket, Jackson said, and “you’re basically being sold all the things that create the need for an antacid, and then on a separate shelf, all the antacids that will fix the problem for you.” 

During the recent election campaign in the U.K., a tired retort confronted any proposals for expanding green energy and improving health care: How will you pay for it? In Jackson’s view, the question is misleading: Yes, paying public-sector doctors and nurses decently costs money. But so does the extraction of public money from the system by private companies. One report found that the NHS will pay private firms £80 billion for £13 billion of actual investment in new hospital buildings. Similar dynamics have led to the closure of entire care units at some hospitals. In America, policy experts, journalists, and regulators have noted how private equity firms’ focus on generating large returns has eroded the quality of health care. “You can’t serve two masters,” a physician who worked for the private equity–owned U.S. Dermatology Partners told Bloomberg. “You can’t serve patients and investors.”

A standard critique of degrowth is that we can’t afford not to grow: Funding green energy, expanding childcare and health care, raising the living standards of billions living in absolute poverty—all of this costs money. But trying to fix issues like health care or poverty within a system committed to endless growth risks further private-sector profiteering, and in recent decades has exacerbated inequality rather than narrowing it. From this vantage, the debate between growth and degrowth is also misleading. A better question is: In what sectors and locations do we need more or less growth to satisfy human needs while remaining within the planetary boundaries?

There’s a basic reason why an economy that expands the provision of care might tend toward a low- or post-growth state: Different sectors of the economy have differential potentials for productivity growth, as American economist William Baumol and others have noted. Manufacturing cars or writing software is fundamentally different from caring for children, helping the sick, or playing string quartets. In some sectors, automation readily drives productivity gains and economic growth. In others, trying to increase efficiency simply degrades quality. A childcare center can’t just keep adding toddlers and making teachers spend less time with each. As Jackson wrote in his first book: “The value of a service is inherently linked to the time spent by people delivering it. Reducing the labour input to these services is both difficult and counterproductive.”

Even in cases where new technology can boost productivity, this isn’t always desirable. Jackson likes the example of leaf blowers, which create noise and pollution to move debris. Humans with brooms might be slower, but they create a more pleasing world as well as more jobs. Shifting from a leaf-blower economy to a broom economy isn’t just a matter of individual choices; it presupposes a redesign of the institutions and incentives that help shape those choices. In short, it requires politics. 

The current Labour Party seems committed to growth, but the manifesto of the U.K.’s Green Party, which Jackson supports, proposes policies that reflect core elements of his vision: a need for massive investment in the care sector and in green energy. The supposed stumper—“How will you pay for that?”—has a straightforward answer: reasonable taxation on the wealthy and an end to private-sector siphoning of public resources. Though still tiny in absolute terms, the Greens quadrupled their representation in the House of Commons in the elections this July. Labour now plans to raise some taxes and invest heavily in care and green energy. In America, many visions of a Green New Deal reflect the same logic: Areas like green energy and care provision need to grow; the fossil fuel industry does not. Taxes and subsidies are an obvious mechanism for achieving this goal. Whether such a shift causes GDP to rise matters much less than whether it provides for basic human needs while remaining within ecological limits. 

The ecological economist Herman Daly once described the degrowth movement as “a slogan in search of a programme.” This is becoming increasingly less true. Conceptually, the term is now crisply defined, as in this definition from Timothée Parrique: “a planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption in rich countries to lower environmental pressures and inequalities while improving well-being.” Pragmatically, elements of a policy program are also clear, whether it’s reforming taxes, adopting new metrics to replace GDP, or shifting investment toward care and green infrastructure, from urban parks to rainwater retention systems.

Dramatic decreases in the availability and quality of water, air, food, and energy are already a reality around the world. In the coming decades, degrowth or post-growth economies may not be chosen so much as experienced, though we still have some freedom to shape their structure and fairness. Economist Kenneth Boulding told Congress in 1973: “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” More than half a century later, many influential madmen and economists remain, but there are also signs of growing sanity.