Regrowth Not Degrowth

Comments on a recent Macro’n’Cheese podcast : “Degrowth and MMT” with Christopher Olk and Colleen Schneider . This is from a big Macro’n’Cheese fan. They’ve got a great library of podcasts.

Regrowth is Based

While I absolutely unconditionally love my RealProgressives colleagues, the Degrowth meme and language framing is incrediubly dumb. I say this even though Bill Mitchell uses it (ok, he’s not a genius).

Here were my comments on the youtube copy of the podcast (I refuse Facebook, so cannto comment on the original websites).

On Degrowthism

Their research paper has a good-to-fair opening sentence: “Degrowth lacks a theory of how the state can finance ambitious social-ecological policies and public provisioning systems while maintaining macroeconomic stability during a reduction of economic activity.” — however, for us pure MMT activist scholars even this is weird language. You do not need a “theory” of how to finance when you have real resources you can employ to work on any problem. You just need to understand the currency is not a finite physical resource. But even degrowth MMT’ers get things wrong — they still think nominal inflation is a real constraint, when it is not${}^\dagger$ , it is a political psychology constraint, and part of the MMT activist effort needs to be overcoming this final prejudice. Which means understanding what a currency gauge is, and how to use a gauge as a tool for promoting economic justice.
      Our focus should always be in the real resources and full meaningful employment, not on how this can be accomplioshed using a monetary system. MMT has the katter completely handled for you, it is not rocket science, it is about distribbnution — who ends up holding the net government currency issue that has paid workers to get done what can be done.
      ${}^\dagger$ (Unless the CIA hitmen knock on your door with a silly letter from the IMF, that while silly can nevertheless seriously endanger your people, but no worse so than economic injustice.)

I added:

Yeah yeah SteveG, I know you’ll say “degrowth” is flames in their face or too their feet. But there’s a limit to what normies can tolerate, and eventually it becomes counter-productive for real progressives. Normies, like it or not, are not the brightest sparks. But they are the mass we need to move.

On “The Periphery”

Referring to Olk and Schenider’s recent paper with Jason Hickel I added this comment:

Note also in their paper they use Kaboub for “addressing” the “sovereignty” challenges facing peripheral nations. This is bone-headed and wrong. Their paragraph is "… They ((Kaboub et al)) recommend interest rate targeting by peripheral central banks, floating exchange rates, and industrial policy for food and energy sovereignty, alongside calling for de-colonial reparations and the abolition of illegitimate debts to increase monetary sovereignty,…" — first, you do not want interest rate targeting, you want ZIRP for maximum policy space. Second, the monetary policy aught be no constraint at all, it is not even an inflation constraint, provided the lower real wage rises faster or no slower than the highest real wage, because then the trajectory is for justice and greater equality. Third, the only true constraint facing a peripheral nation government that has an army and tax department and understand MMT, is a foreign coup or soft power actor like the USA. That is not an MMT problem. It is a UN problem, and the UN must address it with proper global collective security, not provincial NATO collective insecurity.

I invite any readers of Ōhanga Pai to tell me how I’m missing something vital. Just bear in mind I do read Bill Mitchell’s blog and have nothing much to disagree with billyblog about, just let’s transition to regrowth instead of degrowth narratives. Tell people a more hopeful story because there is still a glimmmer of hope. Neoliberalims has not won. The neoliberals might fool normies for a long, long time, but they’re not going to be able to do so forever. How long might be measured in climate global boiling deaths. Which is a regrowth story in the end, because we’re not knowingly fated to become extinct.

Regrowthism is not an -ism

Last comment for today, I commented on myself over on substack, the remark was thus:

I had a recent comment or two to make on Degrowthism, I think it is time, for the sake of better appeal to normies (who realistically we are going to have to carry, it cannot be avoided) to drop the inflammatory “degrowth” meme and rhetoric, and adopt the more realistic and pragmatic Regrowth narrative. Is there even such a narrative? Well, it’d be super easy to make one, just get Hickel and Raworth and everyone to rewrite all their books and papers replacing “degrowth” with “regrowth”. That’s even a recipe for easily doubling-up your publications yo’.

Because the natural world, to a realist, is rich with processes of life and death, growth and decay, form and chaos, it is entirely natural (in the deepest sense) to have social discourse about regrowth. It is thus no “-ism”. It’s the real deal.