Growth and Consumption: Ezra Klein Interview

Annie Galvin
…Simon has a really interesting question: “What does think of Jason Hickel’s argument that degrowth is humanity’s best hope for addressing climate change?” So maybe could you just quickly gloss what degrowth is, and then give your opinion on it?

Ezra Klein

Yeah. And maybe we should do an episode on this. I have very complicated feelings about degrowth. So one is that it is tricky to talk about, as you say, because I find its advocates will continue to say that you’re defining it wrong. So let me use a definition from Hickel, which is, and I’m quoting him here, “Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”

And so I’d note two things here. One is “designed.” Degrowth is, as its advocates understand it, a act of global economic planning really without equal anywhere in human history. It is an act of extraordinary central planning. So that’s one thing that is going to become important in my answer.

I’d say there’s part of this vision I’m sympathetic to, and then part of it that I just don’t think holds together. I would distinguish a critique of want and a critique of growth. And the way I would do that is that, as you hear if you listen to the show, I’m pretty critical of a lot of the ways capitalism generates desire.

Desire is something we build through advertising, through social mimicry. This is a show that is supported by advertising. This is part of the desire- generation complex in its business model. And we are told and taught to want a lot of things, not only that we don’t need, but that don’t make us happier. And so not all growth as measured by G.D.P. is good growth.

But a lot of what people want is fine, or great, or whatever. It’s their desire, and it’s not for me to tell them the jeans they’re interested in are incorrect. And a lot of it I don’t think is under the power of policymakers to control. I don’t think it’s all advertising. I don’t know that if you cut down advertising, the amount people would spend on consumption would go way down. They might simply consume other things.

And so I want people to have rich, materially fulfilling lives. And I think it’ll be a very hard piece to change. So in terms of having a counterweight to the materialism, the ideology of materialism in modern society, that’s a part of degrowth that I’m very open to.

But now let me talk about degrowth more in the terms of it is a direct political project, which is as an answer to climate change. I would cut this into a few pieces. Is degrowth necessary for addressing climate change? Is it the fastest way to address climate change? And is it desirable? It has to be at least one of those things to be the strategy you’d want to take.

And I don’t think it is. Let’s start with necessary. Many countries in Europe, even the United States, are growing while reducing their carbon footprint. Now, you could say they’re not doing so fast enough depending on the country. But they could all do so much faster if there was enough political will to deploy more renewable technology, to tax carbon, to do a bunch of things that we have not been able to pass. So it is clearly true that we can decouple growth and energy usage.

Hickel, to be fair, will say that that may be true. But given the speed at which we need to act, we can’t just be deploying renewable energy technology. It would also help the situation if we stopped using as much through material consumption. That is, I think, conceptually true and politically false.

I mean, let’s just state that speed is, first and foremost, a political problem. There is a delta between where we are right now in terms of what we are doing on climate change and where we could be. That delta is big, and that delta gets bigger every year because it gets harder every year. And the time we have to act before we start getting some of the really truly catastrophic feedback loops in play is shortening. So you’re now talking here about the speed at which you can move politics.

So for something to be faster, it doesn’t just need to be faster if you implemented it. It needs to be something you can implement such it accelerates the politics of radical climate action. And that’s where I think degrowth completely falls apart. And I have tried to look for the answer people give on this, and I’ve never found one that is convincing.

So again, I’ll quote Hickel on this: “Degrowth has a discriminating approach to reducing economic activity. It seeks to scale down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production, i.e., the production of S.U.V.s, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising and planned obsolescence” — by which he means there, the fact that expiration dates are built into a lot of our electronics — “while expanding socially important sectors like health care, education, care and conviviality.”

And I’d urge people to think about that for a minute. I mean, you can listen to that and you will assume correctly that I am sympathetic to the idea that a lot of those goods are not great. I’m a vegan. I don’t eat beef. I would like nobody else to eat beef.

I think that if the political demand of the climate movement becomes you don’t get to eat beef, you will set climate politics back so far, so fast, it would be disastrous. Same thing with S.U.V.s. I don’t like S.U.V.s. I don’t drive one. But if you are telling people in rich countries that the climate movement is for them not having the cars they want to have, you are just going to lose. You are going to lose fast.

We watched this happen for years before Elon Musk and some others began inventing cars that were both electrified and were actually cool cars. You weren’t going to get everybody in a Prius. You might, over time, get them into the post-Tesla generations of electronic vehicles.

This is where the politics of it for me fall apart. I’d at least like to see some empirical evidence for the claim that degrowthers are right, and that their appeal will speed the politics of doing hard things on climate change. Because I think it will do the opposite. And I don’t see politicians winning in the countries they would need to win on anything like this platform. Quite the contrary.

I watched the most effective attack against Joe Biden’s climate policies. It dominated the news for a day or two. It was Fox News just making up — just completely making up — a false claim that Biden was going to limit or restrict red meat.

Annie Galvin

Right. [LAUGHS]

Ezra Klein

So my worry with degrowth is that it is trying to take the politics out of politics. It is attacking the flaws of the current strategy as not moving fast enough when the impediments are political, but then not accepting the impediments to its own political path forward.

I will say, because I think it’ll be weird to people if I don’t mention this, that there is the big problem, of course, that the rising generation of emissions is coming from China, from India. I think it’s something like 2/3 of emissions are now from middle income countries. That is only going up.

Hickel and other degrowthers will say that, yes, the point of this is that the rich countries, which have already used more than their fair share of the carbon budget, should cut their carbon usage so poor countries can grow. I cannot imagine how you are going to enforce this as a political and economic planning regime. How you will get rich countries to agree to do less so poor countries can have more. I mean, look at what has happened with vaccine hoarding.

I don’t want to say that this isn’t a good moral weight on the conversation or, in the long term, a good push for people to think about different ways of having growth, different ways of human flourishing. But the entirety — as the degrowth people will agree — the entire question of the climate change conversation is speed. And I just don’t see the argument for degrowth as being anything but an extraordinarily slower way of approaching the politics, probably counterproductive compared to what we’re doing, which is I think you can make tremendous strides on climate change by deploying renewable energy technologies and giving people the opportunity to have a more materially fulfilling life atop those technologies.

And by the way, when that happens in rich countries, as we have seen, it ends up subsidizing these renewable energy technological advances for poorer countries. So it is a fact that Germany and other countries did so much to subsidize solar for themselves, it has also made it possible for countries like China and India to have such a rapid advance in solar technology that it’s affordable for them to do a lot of their growth on that platform.

So I also think there are cross-subsidies in rich countries trying to maintain growth renewable energy deployment that end up helping poor countries change what they’re doing in a useful way, too. So that’s my take on degrowth. But I understand its appeal. I just don’t understand its politics.

Annie Galvin

So Eric had a question that relates to this, as well. So Eric asks, “How responsible are individuals for decreasing their personal consumption, and what role should government policy play?”

Ezra Klein

The way I try to think about this is, don’t think about consumption — even your consumption — as individual. Think of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion. I don’t think my personal decision to not eat meat is that important. On the scale of the global animal trade, it’s meaningless.

But I caught my veganism from my wife. Other people have caught veganism or vegetarianism from me. And it’s in that way that individual attitudes ladder up to social attitudes, and then to social and political change. Sometimes I’ll see people cut what individuals do and what happens in politics. But I think that’s a cut that you need to be very careful making.

It is very hard to impose through politics outcomes and social mores that individuals do not already believe in their private lives. You can do it sometimes. I mean, we’ve had times like, say, Brown v. Board, where that has to happen. But it’s a very difficult way of going about it.

And oftentimes the way politics changes is that enough individuals have changed — and I think this is true also for civil rights and a lot of the examples of what sometimes get looked at as legislative or legal change. Oftentimes enough individuals have changed that they are now open to the idea that the policy regime will move into accordance with their values. But if you’re someone who, say, loves eating meat, the idea that the government is going to come tomorrow and tell you you can’t is just not going to fly.

So taking seriously the ideas and morals and views of individuals, that’s not a different sphere than what ends up happening in politics. And it’s not just individual. All of the stuff catches. And it is why I’m a fan of people not being quiet about the way they try to instantiate their political ideals in their individual lives. I think that a lot of the value of the choices we make is in our willingness to try to use those to change the choices other people see as normal for them to make.

Annie Galvin

Just to make sure that we answer Eric’s question, is there a role for government policy to play at all in reducing consumption?

Ezra Klein

Yes, there are many ways. I mean, one simple way government policy can help reduce consumption that is negative is to correctly — I’m going to sound very economic here — correctly price in negative externalities. [LAUGHTER] But correctly price what things cost. I am still somebody who believes it would be valuable, even though I don’t think it is politically possible, to tax carbon, or certainly to have put a tax on it years ago.

There are all kinds of ways we could tax things that are actually bad for the world, bad for the environment. I mean, we do this to cigarettes right now at a pretty high level. So the government can often nudge people to make different decisions than they otherwise would.

Occasionally, it can ban. I mean, it can ban the worst things, and it often should. But yeah, government can use taxes and other kinds of pricing mechanisms to make sure that the prices people see and somewhat reflect the social cost of what they are doing. And also in the other direction. I mean, the amount we have spent to subsidize oil and gas exploration or defense technology or all kinds of other things that are not my favorite parts of our economy compared to what we have spent subsidizing better choices, I think, should make us sit up and wonder about what our priorities truly are.

So it isn’t just you can price the bad things, but you can pump a lot of money into making sure there are good options for people to have. It is very difficult to live in a way your society is not set up for you to live in. And that’s asking a lot of people individually, maybe not more than should be asked of us, but nevertheless more than most are willing to pay. So the government can often create other, better options. And there are all kinds of ways to do that,