What are the building blocks of a post-growth politics? And how can we get from here to there?

A crucial part of the answer is that we need a deep reframing of the central questions of politics. In the first place, we should talk less about the economy as a machine for producing more goods (many of which turn out to be “bads”). We should talk more about what an economy is actually for: satisfying needs, creating a better society and improving our quality of life. Once we do that we see that continuing growth can be counter-productive, as well as impossible in a finite system such as the planet we live on.

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The happiness paradox

Growth doesn’t work. According the Office for National Statistics, GDP has grown by a factor of five since 1955, but we are not five times more content. Indeed, economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald have shown that during a period of unprecedented prosperity from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, reported levels of happiness dropped in the US and were flat in the UK.

This brings into focus the issues that are really important, such as equality. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have shown, levels of equality are much better indicators of a society’s health than average or aggregate wealth. On virtually every indicator - mental health, teenage pregnancies, drug abuse, child wellbeing, big prison populations, sense of community, environmental sustainability - more equal societies do better. This is true for the better-off, as well as the worse-off.

Recognising this would help us to build a sense of enough, of sufficiency, and to generate an end to the materialistic culture of more. From this point of view, a better life is one that builds on a true respect for nature. The indigenous Latin American concept of buen vivir is a good place to start.

The macabre dance between growth and inequality

Key to this transformative reframing is the notion of sharing. Historically, growth and inequality have been partners in a macabre dance of reciprocal legitimation. Inequality is regarded as necessary for growth (if people are equal, why would anyone bother to try to get ahead?), and growth is used to quieten the voices of those asking for more equality by holding out the promise of an ever bigger cake, from which some crumbs will surely find their way into the mouths of the less fortunate. We must let go of this “trickle-down” nonsense once and for all.

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In the reframed world, common sense will become “commons-sense”. The concept of the commons lies beyond the limits to growth. The quest for endless new frontiers to turn into resources and commodities, the quest for speculative profit, the quest for accumulation - all can be turned back by a return to living on and in the commons.

The commons is the new frame that may well come to revive the public and the social. The public sphere is where members of a society learn what a common resource is and how to look after it. It is where people develop non-contractual habits. They learn how to cope with free-riders without falling into the trap of believing that the only solution is privatised “incentivisation” – which just makes the problem worse. Private-finance initiatives, individual learning contracts, council house sales, declining library budgets, all point away from the public towards the private, which is precisely the wrong direction.

Towards a post-growth politics

We should also drill down much more into the politics of personal and social life – what can the political world do to improve family relationships, grow communities and friendship, and even address personal freedom and values?

This is where the values agenda of Tom Crompton and his Common Cause (pdf) colleagues is absolutely correct. It’s also where we ought to be talking once more about some of the ideas that emerged from 70s and 80s feminism: the “personal is political” agenda. Let’s have more life out of work, more fulfilment within it, and let’s foster these spaces where personal and social values intersect.

Then we can at last move toward a leisure society in which the distinction between jobs and work has been broken down. Greens should be wary of putting all their eggs in boxes marked “jobs”; employment needs to be shared out, most of us need to work less, and in less alienated settings. Then we can start to live more, in ways that needn’t be commodified or designed to be purchased by time-poor people unable to grow their own food or share a collective life.

Then, and only then, will we live in a world of post-growth common-sense in which we have more space for our green and pleasant land, to think and walk and be in.

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