The latest attack on economic growth comes wrapped in moral language. Its advocates promise less poverty, greater equality, and a safer climate. Their policies would deliver less production, less investment, and fewer opportunities. That is managed decline, not prosperity.
The UN-backed Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth proposes 80 policies meant to reduce society’s dependence on growth. A separate Global Justice Report, led by Thomas Piketty and researchers at the World Inequality Lab, puts numbers behind this vision.
The reports differ, but they share the same central mistake. They treat growth as an obstacle to justice rather than the force that has lifted billions of people.
What Degrowth Would Mean
The Piketty-led model would push rich countries toward output of roughly €60,000 per person, or about $69,000, by 2100. It would hold annual per-person growth in wealthy regions near zero. That figure requires context.
US GDP per capita was about $89,962 in 2025. The proposed level is about $21,000 lower, or roughly 23 percent below current American output per person. GDP per capita is not the same as a worker’s salary. It measures the total value produced in the economy divided by the population. For another comparison, personal income per capita was running near $77,800 in early 2026.
Not content to slow some distant, future excess, the plan envisions an America that produces less than we do today. The model would also cut annual work hours by more than half, shifting labor away from construction and manufacturing. As Veronique de Rugy notes, “a comprehensive program for global managed decline…making everyone poorer” isn’t just a likely forecast — it’s the plan’s whole design.
But building fewer homes will not solve a housing shortage. Making fewer goods will not make necessities more affordable. Restricting work will not help families trying to move ahead.
Growth Is Human Progress
Economic growth is not just a line on a government chart. It is the process through which people create more value from limited resources. That process gives us better medicine. It makes food easier to afford. It allows workers to earn more while spending fewer hours producing the same goods.
Productivity is the engine of rising living standards. When a worker produces more value per hour, wages and leisure can rise together. Degrowth reverses this process, reducing production and hoping people will enjoy the loss.
Emile Phaneuf and Christopher Lingle put the stakes plainly in “Degrowth Kills People—Yes, Literally.” Wealthier societies are healthier, safer, and better able to survive crises. Scarcity carries a human cost.
The Poverty Record Is Clear
The strongest argument against degrowth is what growth has already accomplished. Around 60 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty in 1950. By 1990, the share was about 40 percent. The World Bank now estimates that it fell to 10.4 percent in 2024 and could fall to 10 percent in 2026.
The number of people in extreme poverty also fell sharply, even as the world’s population grew. Under the World Bank’s updated $3-per-day standard, about 847 million people remained in extreme poverty in 2024. That is still far too many. But the direction matters.
Since 1990, roughly 1.5 billion people have escaped extreme poverty. Much of that progress occurred in Asia as countries expanded trade, welcomed investment, and allowed more private enterprise. They did not become wealthier by closing factories.
The World Bank also finds that poverty reduction accelerated after 1990. The average decline doubled from about half a percentage point per year before 1990 to roughly one point annually afterward. That is what economic liberalization made possible.
Poverty Is Not Inequality
Degrowth advocates often move between poverty and inequality as though they mean the same thing. They do not.
A poor family does not gain because a wealthy family loses money. A worker is not better off because a factory closes and makes an inequality chart look more balanced. Making fewer goods will not make necessities more affordable. Equality achieved by destroying wealth is shared deprivation.
As I have argued at AIER, the better question is why government policy blocks people from earning, investing, and moving upward. The goal should be to expand opportunity, not punish success. Growth does not guarantee that every outcome is equal. It does create more room for people to improve their lives. Stagnation makes mobility harder.
The Plan Undermines Itself
The Piketty proposal depends on a global fund financed by taxes on income and wealth. Yet it would weaken the economies expected to finance that fund. It also assumes poorer countries can keep growing while rich countries consume and invest less. That does not add up.
Developing countries need capital. They also need customers. If the United States and Europe stagnate, both become scarcer. A development plan cannot succeed by weakening the world’s largest sources of investment and demand.
Degrowth also creates a political problem. Someone must decide how much people may work. Someone must choose which industries shrink and which goods are no longer produced. Those decisions will not remain inside an academic model.
Markets coordinate millions of choices through prices and voluntary exchange. No global commission has enough knowledge to replace that process. Managed scarcity eventually requires managed lives.
Prosperity Is the Better Path
Rejecting degrowth does not mean ignoring pollution or other real harms. Property rights matter. So does accountability. Innovation can reduce environmental damage without forcing society backward.
As Joakim Book explained in his review of The Capitalist Manifesto, prosperous societies have more resources to adapt and invest in cleaner technology. Poor societies must focus on survival. The world’s poorest people do not need comfortable academics deciding they have reached “enough.” They need the freedom to work, save, invest, and build.
Degrowth is a luxury belief because its advocates already enjoy the abundance they would restrict. Poverty cannot be overcome by rationing scarcity. It is overcome by economic freedom that lets people create abundance.
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