Opinion | The world is racing to hell in a shopping cart

Overshoot Day is one of a growing number of indicators that remind us of the growing challenge global warmingEnvironmental pollution, resource scarcity, the often unnoticed extinction of animal and plant species and the unsustainability of our stuff-obsessed lifestyle. Population growth and our success in lifting communities out of poverty only reinforce our assumption of infinite growth on a finite planet.

My concern is not only that these indicators are pointing in a very bad direction, but that they are doing so without being noticed. I think I am part of the majority who do not read in the news about the disturbingly early onset of Overshoot Day this year.

Has anyone read anything about the international degrowth conference in Pontevedra, Spain, in mid-June? Not even the official website reported on the conference’s outcomes. My quick search for press reports turned up nothing. For a global movement whose goal is to dissuade us from unsustainable consumption patterns and to get governments to rethink their blind pursuit of gross domestic product growth, this silence speaks volumes.

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The call for Degrowth strategy came into fashion in the early 2000s, until Lehman Brothers crash 2008and again during the shocking economic collapse resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly among the political left and environmental movements concerned about the dangerous pace of global warming.

For mainstream economists who have considered GDP growth to be the goal of all governments around the world for more than a century, talk of the need for a degrowth strategy has a heretical flavor, and the concept has always been controversial.

At the heart of the degrowth movement was frustration with the inadequacies of GDP as a measure of progress, which did not take into account crime, resource depletion, domestic work, volunteerism, or the value of higher education, while simultaneously giving positive consideration to prison construction or defense spending. Degrowth advocates resented the fact that pollution was counted twice in the calculation of GDP – once when it was created and again when it was removed.

Degrowth supporters looked for additional indicators to better measure progress – such as universally accessible health care and education, taxing the rich, status consumption and environmentally harmful products and services. They advocated a Unconditional basic incomeCommunity cooperation and increased use of public transport.

Above all, they wanted to replace our dependence on GDP as the most important measure of progress and in 1995 they landed on the real progress indicatoror GPI – a measure that has been widely and powerfully adopted because of its inclusion of measures of well-being, wellness, social and economic justice, but which is hampered by the inclusion of subjective values.

Women in traditional clothing at Bhutan’s Royal Highland Festival, a mix of music, dance and sport, in 2023. The kingdom is famous for its Gross National Happiness Index. Photo: Bassem Nimah — Women in traditional clothing at the Royal Highland Festival in Bhutan, a mix of music, dance and sport, in 2023. The kingdom is famous for its Gross National Happiness Index. Photo: Bassem Nimah

Many have studied such indicators, including a team from the Quality of Life Initiative at the University of Maryland. Claudio O. Delang and Yi Hang Yu of Baptist University studied the GPI in Hong Kong from 1968 to 2010 and found that the GPI steadily declined in most countries, while it rose in Hong Kong.

Why? First, the relocation of production to the rest of the world. Greater Bay Area led to an economic restructuring away from labor-intensive manufacturing and towards the relocation of polluting industries to the mainland. Second, the lack of subsidies for shrinking industries enabled more efficient investment. And third, Hong Kong’s small physical size enabled lower transportation costs and more efficient public investment. Unfortunately, a GPI has not been calculated since 2010, so we are left to wonder how it would have performed over the past 14 years.

The uncomfortable reality is that it is perfectly reasonable to improve the way we measure our economic progress. Unfortunately, the GPI has not provided a panacea. And the degrowth movement seems to be contributing little. In March this year, Alessio Terzi of Cambridge University came to the depressing conclusion that degrowth is a politically impractical dead end: “The most degrowthists can achieve is to persuade a privileged minority to adopt more sustainable consumption habits.”

No matter how obvious the global need is to reduce consumption, to get Western consumers to give up meat, SUVs, flying and other carbon-intensive products and services is unrealistic because “betting on the moral improvement of humanity is a bad bet,” he wrote.

“Avoiding climate catastrophe requires a multi-faceted strategy with multiple solutions. But degrowth is not one of them,” he concluded. The need to drastically reduce our consumption of global resources and create a GDP-like metric that more effectively measures human well-being is as urgent as ever. Unfortunately, the actions we have taken so far have largely gone unnoticed.

David Dodwell is CEO of trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, which focuses on developments and challenges in the Asia-Pacific region over the past four decades.

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