Growth vs. Degrowth: It’s not that simple

That which is not growing is fundamentally dying. That’s a universal truth.

But…it’s NOT “that simple”. First of all, you need to define your terms.

What does “growth” even mean? Is it simply the expansion of size?

Growth of a human body in terms of size ends at an early age.

In economics, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) does not measure the health of the economy. It mostly reflects the unhealthy growth of debt and government spending. Is that the “growth” you really want?

It is well known that dematerialization is a fundamental attribute of technological progress. Things get smaller and eventually disappear into a few lines of code. More, bigger stuff is anti-growth, in that sense.

I could go on, but simply put, it’s NOT “that simple”.

What you really mean, or should realize, is that the “growth” you want is the growth of Intelligence.

Intelligence is the reduction of informational entropy in a given domain. An Intelligent System reduces informational entropy and progressively reduces the energy and resources it needs to reduce informational entropy. As Intelligence grows, in many cases this means that scale of the system decreases and the resources needed to accomplish the same informational entropy reduction also decreases. In this sense, degrowth is growth!

Many of the assumptions that are built into the ossified “growth vs. degrowth” debate are dysfunctional and need to be exploded. Ground yourself in real terms and then advocate for a path forward into the future. It is NOT that simple.