User:Gaeanautes/Lasting influence

Genesis of degrowth: The lasting influence of Georgescu-Roegen
The degrowth movement recognises Romanian American mathematician, statistician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen as the main intellectual figure inspiring the movement. In his magnum opus, Georgescu-Roegen argues that economic scarcity is rooted in physical reality; that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity; that the carrying capacity of Earth — that is, Earth's capacity to sustain human populations and consumption levels — is bound to decrease sometime in the future as Earth's finite stock of mineral resources is presently being extracted and put to use; and consequently, that the world economy as a whole is heading towards an inevitable future collapse.

Georgescu-Roegen's intellectual inspiration to degrowth goes back to the 1970s. When Georgescu-Roegen delivered a lecture at the University of Geneva in 1974, he made a lasting impression on the young and newly graduated French historian and philosopher Jacques Grinevald, who had earlier been introduced to Georgescu-Roegen's magnum opus by an academic advisor. Georgescu-Roegen and Grinevald soon made friends, and Grinevald started devoting his research to a closer study of Georgescu-Roegen's work. As a result, in 1979 Grinevald published a French translation of a selection of Georgescu-Roegen's articles entitled Demain la décroissance: Entropie – Écologie – Économie ('Tomorrow, the Decline: Entropy – Ecology – Economy'). Georgescu-Roegen, who spoke French fluently, personally approved the use of the term décroissance in the title of the French translation. The book gained influence in French intellectual and academic circles from the outset. Later, the book was expanded and republished in 1995, and once again in 2006; however, the word Demain ('Tomorrow') was removed from the title of the book in these second and third editions.

By the time Grinevald suggested the term décroissance to form part of the title of the French translation of Georgescu-Roegen's work, this term had already disseminated through French intellectual circles since the early 1970s to signify a deliberate political action to downscale the economy on a permanent and voluntary basis. Simultaneously, but independently hereof, Georgescu-Roegen had criticised the ideas of The Limits to Growth and Herman Daly's steady-state economy in his polemical article on Energy and Economic Myths, delivered as a series of lectures from 1972 and onwards at various places, but not published in print before 1975. In this article, Georgescu-Roegen pointed out the following view:

[Authors who] were set exclusively on proving the impossibility of growth ... were easily deluded by a simple, now widespread, but false syllogism: Since exponential growth in a finite world leads to disasters of all kinds, ecological salvation lies in the stationary state. ... The crucial error consists in not seeing that not only growth, but also a zero-growth state, nay, even a declining state which does not converge toward annihilation, cannot exist forever in a finite environment. ... [T]he important, yet unnoticed point [is] that the necessary conclusion of the arguments in favor of that vision [of a stationary state] is that the most desirable state is not a stationary, but a declining one. Undoubtedly, the current growth must cease, nay, be reversed. [Emphasis in original]

When reading this particular passage of the text, Grinevald realised the striking conceptual resemblance between Georgescu-Roegen's viewpoint and the French debates progressing by the time; this resemblance transformed into the title of the French edition. Taken together, the translation of Georgescu-Roegen's work into French both fed on and gave further impetus to the concept of décroissance in the country — and everywhere else in the francophone world — thereby creating something of an intellectual feedback loop.

By the 2000s, when décroissance was to be translated from French and back into English as the catchy banner for the new social movement, the original term 'decline' was now deemed inappropriate and misdirected for the purpose: 'Decline' usually refers to an unexpected, unwelcome and temporary economic recession, something bad to be avoided or quickly overcome. Instead, the neologism 'degrowth' was coined to signify a deliberate political action to downscale the economy on a permanent and voluntary basis — as in the prevailing French usage of the term — something good to be welcomed and maintained, or so followers believe.

When the first international degrowth conference of its kind was held in Paris in 2008, the participants bestowed a generous amount of credit and appreciation on Georgescu-Roegen and his work. Further, in his manifesto on Farewell to Growth, leading French champion of the degrowth movement Serge Latouche has credited Georgescu-Roegen as 'a main theoretical source of degrowth.' Likewise, Italian degrowth theorist Mauro Bonaiuti has stated that Georgescu-Roegen's work is considered 'one of the analytical cornerstones of the degrowth perspective.'