Adéqroissance.
Deqgrowth.
The idea, which is becoming more and more fashionable, according to which it would be necessary to wish for and organize a decrease in the economy, in order to fight against the destruction it engenders, may seem a priori totally stupid: How can do we want to institutionalize the depression, the consequences of which the world today suffers in terms of unemployment and poverty? How can we hope for a decline in production, that is to say in the average income, when the most basic needs of the populations of the developed countries are not satisfied, not to mention those of the billions of people who still suffer from extreme poverty ? How can we hope for degrowth when so much progress is announced, giving hope for the possibility of ridding humanity of hard work, suffering, ignorance and pollution? Finally, how can we think that zero or negative growth would improve the situation of the environment, when it is not growth that pollutes, but production, the content of which is not improved by its stagnation?
And yet, the idea makes sense: if we understand it as a desire to put an end to the errors of our production model, to the madness and fatigue of speed, efficiency, waste, accumulation and thoughtless replacement of gadgets by other gadgets; and above all as the desire to challenge the market definition of well-being.
However, to accomplish such a change, it is not a decrease in the proper sense of the word that the world needs. Nor even of another growth, which would change nothing in the structure of production. But a radical change in the very nature of the material goods produced and their relationship with time, with sensations and feelings.
Such a mutation, which should lead to adequate growth (hence the neologism “decrease”) would require thinking of the social system as being at the service of the best use of time, even non-market; to build a production system constantly adapted to new knowledge in terms of resource conservation; to imagine a health system based on prevention, even non-market, rather than on care, which is itself very expensive; to put in place ever-improving governance to take account of people's long-term desires and preferences. The economy would then end up leaving much more room for the production and exchange of free immaterial goods, ranging from knowledge to art; and the market should content itself with providing the infrastructure, in particular through the production of basic goods.
This change will require huge investments, which will result, for a long time to come, in strong growth in material production, which has become adequate, ie increasingly energy-efficient and concerned with preserving the environment; turned towards intangible achievements, made of gratuitousness and altruism, of spirituality and plenitude. This evolution will give its full value to lived time, and no longer to constrained time. It may one day make us forget the very idea of growth, to replace it with that of fulfilment.
j@attali.com
