Thanks for this James, it's great. And I very much agree with your point on ecological crises and inflationary pressure. Some colleagues and I have been working on the macroeconomics of degrowth, and price stability in a degrowth transition. Our policy prescription is similar to what you note, although we don't advocate for a UBI. Rather, a green job guarantee (also a great tool to set a standard for working time reduction) alongside taxation policy and qualitative credit regulation to "degrow" environmentally (e.g. fossil fuels) and socially (e.g. fast fashion, advertising) detrimental sectors. A key point on ensuring price stability from the degrowth perspective is moving towards decommodifying access to key needs satisfiers - thus ensuring access to them, which is the reason price stability matters at all. Building out universal public services is the strongest way to do this.
I'll share a couple links below. It would be fantastic to hear your thoughts.
Hi Colleen! Thank you very much for the comments, and I'm glad we are mostly in agreement on where things are going. The growing body of serious academic work around degrowth has been a huge positive step forward in the last few years, I reckon, and provides the potential for a recovery of the left on terms appropriate for the Anthropocene.
I very much agree on decommodification, which is why I think UBI is of fundamental importance to a viable socially and environmentally just economic programme, since it starts to breaks the link between pay and work - that is to say, it decommodifies the most important commodity that exists under capitalism, which is labour power.
For a broadly similar reason, I am not very keen on "job guarantees": we need to be thinking more seriously about how to *reduce* work, and end the idea of paid employment as a necessary component of a good, sustaianable society. I also worry very much that a "job guarantee" enacted under capitalist conditions - which is what would prevail globally were any specific country to try to introduce one - would lead to it becoming a method of coercion against labour. I tried to spell out some arguments here: https://novaramedia.com/2020/05/13/pandemic-labour-and-the-politics-of-job-guarantees/
I liked Emma River-Roberts talking about a "workers' degrowth" - framing the politics as arising from below, with redistribution and workers' power at its core, rather than top-down social democratic approaches: https://www.thewceg.org/resource/degrowth-trust-and-the-working-class
But I don't view either of these policy issues as decisive arguments - we can go backwards and forwards on what should be in or out of any specific programme, or how things might look.
What I think is crucial is keeping well away from MMT, which I view not only as the wrong way to think about the economy, but one that is going to become *increasingly* wrong as the polycrisis progresses. This deserves a more developed response, so I'll have to write something on the Nature article when I get a chance, but it boils down to, first, that we need an economics of shortages, not one of implied abundance (ie one that is demand-determined, as MMT very strongly is) - this is why I like Jo's article above; second, that in a world of competing capitals and global capitalist competition, there is a hierarchy of currencies and attempts to promote monetary activism rely on its existence - in other words, the US has most capacity of all to do what it wants, because it (for now) has the dominant currency of the dollar, the UK has less space, and less developed countries have least of all - MMT reinforces a global hierarchy at the level of theory; finally, and most normatively, by encouraging about what states are, and assuming money could become somehow a purely neutral instrument of any policy we choose, it reinforces the (now unworkable) politics of 20th century social democracy in its most Fabian form - to be crude, that capitalism will be made nicer once we have nice people pulling the state's levers. We need instead a thoroughgoing theoretical and practical criticism of the existing monetary system and its integration into global capitalism that MMT, in its theoretical construction, cannot provide.
I will try and write this out at more length but I find it very hard to see how MMT can be bent into a genuinely useful place for degrowth purposes *unless* we are prepared to allow some direct contradictions with what most degrowthers would want - global justice between developed and underdeveloped world, most obviously. I'm sorry not to be more positive, but I'm hopeful that a better position can be won and the growing popularity of degrowth does not need to be hobbled like this. I thought Cedric Durand had a useful recent perspective on this: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/living-together?pc=1537
Thanks James, that's an excellent overview. I liked the use of Lakatos there and also the whole emphasis on ecological and geopolitical shocks, which now more than ever undermine conventional economic thinking. Of course the Meadows team's work from the 70s (and its test by time) also point in the same way. I'd be interested to hear more about the alternative macroeconomic management tools that are needed - Jo Michell's suggestion is a start but hardly a comprehensive toolkit.
Thanks for this James, it's great. And I very much agree with your point on ecological crises and inflationary pressure. Some colleagues and I have been working on the macroeconomics of degrowth, and price stability in a degrowth transition. Our policy prescription is similar to what you note, although we don't advocate for a UBI. Rather, a green job guarantee (also a great tool to set a standard for working time reduction) alongside taxation policy and qualitative credit regulation to "degrow" environmentally (e.g. fossil fuels) and socially (e.g. fast fashion, advertising) detrimental sectors. A key point on ensuring price stability from the degrowth perspective is moving towards decommodifying access to key needs satisfiers - thus ensuring access to them, which is the reason price stability matters at all. Building out universal public services is the strongest way to do this.
I'll share a couple links below. It would be fantastic to hear your thoughts.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923002318
https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/cost-of-living-crisis/2023/01/state-end-cost-of-living-crisis-climate-change
Hi Colleen! Thank you very much for the comments, and I'm glad we are mostly in agreement on where things are going. The growing body of serious academic work around degrowth has been a huge positive step forward in the last few years, I reckon, and provides the potential for a recovery of the left on terms appropriate for the Anthropocene.
I very much agree on decommodification, which is why I think UBI is of fundamental importance to a viable socially and environmentally just economic programme, since it starts to breaks the link between pay and work - that is to say, it decommodifies the most important commodity that exists under capitalism, which is labour power.
For a broadly similar reason, I am not very keen on "job guarantees": we need to be thinking more seriously about how to *reduce* work, and end the idea of paid employment as a necessary component of a good, sustaianable society. I also worry very much that a "job guarantee" enacted under capitalist conditions - which is what would prevail globally were any specific country to try to introduce one - would lead to it becoming a method of coercion against labour. I tried to spell out some arguments here: https://novaramedia.com/2020/05/13/pandemic-labour-and-the-politics-of-job-guarantees/
I liked Emma River-Roberts talking about a "workers' degrowth" - framing the politics as arising from below, with redistribution and workers' power at its core, rather than top-down social democratic approaches: https://www.thewceg.org/resource/degrowth-trust-and-the-working-class
But I don't view either of these policy issues as decisive arguments - we can go backwards and forwards on what should be in or out of any specific programme, or how things might look.
What I think is crucial is keeping well away from MMT, which I view not only as the wrong way to think about the economy, but one that is going to become *increasingly* wrong as the polycrisis progresses. This deserves a more developed response, so I'll have to write something on the Nature article when I get a chance, but it boils down to, first, that we need an economics of shortages, not one of implied abundance (ie one that is demand-determined, as MMT very strongly is) - this is why I like Jo's article above; second, that in a world of competing capitals and global capitalist competition, there is a hierarchy of currencies and attempts to promote monetary activism rely on its existence - in other words, the US has most capacity of all to do what it wants, because it (for now) has the dominant currency of the dollar, the UK has less space, and less developed countries have least of all - MMT reinforces a global hierarchy at the level of theory; finally, and most normatively, by encouraging about what states are, and assuming money could become somehow a purely neutral instrument of any policy we choose, it reinforces the (now unworkable) politics of 20th century social democracy in its most Fabian form - to be crude, that capitalism will be made nicer once we have nice people pulling the state's levers. We need instead a thoroughgoing theoretical and practical criticism of the existing monetary system and its integration into global capitalism that MMT, in its theoretical construction, cannot provide.
I will try and write this out at more length but I find it very hard to see how MMT can be bent into a genuinely useful place for degrowth purposes *unless* we are prepared to allow some direct contradictions with what most degrowthers would want - global justice between developed and underdeveloped world, most obviously. I'm sorry not to be more positive, but I'm hopeful that a better position can be won and the growing popularity of degrowth does not need to be hobbled like this. I thought Cedric Durand had a useful recent perspective on this: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/living-together?pc=1537
Thanks James, that's an excellent overview. I liked the use of Lakatos there and also the whole emphasis on ecological and geopolitical shocks, which now more than ever undermine conventional economic thinking. Of course the Meadows team's work from the 70s (and its test by time) also point in the same way. I'd be interested to hear more about the alternative macroeconomic management tools that are needed - Jo Michell's suggestion is a start but hardly a comprehensive toolkit.
Thank Mark! I've gone round the issue of alternative policies in the past (including here: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3146-the-cost-of-living-crisis) but more detailed work is needed.