I’ve been meaning to write about degrowth– the left-wing call for an economy whose material throughput decreases rather than increases– for a while now. Proper academic thoughts will have to wait– it’s important to read if you want to do more than hawk takes, I have another book to finish and a third one to start, and while I’m increasingly an economic historian I remain above all an expert primarily on people who build wooden ships– but here I want to offer one line of critique from my otherwise incomplete thoughts, building on some other economic topics I’ve covered in this newsletter in the last year.

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A little over six years ago, I was arrested by the NYPD as part of an environmental protest. Spending a good eight hours in a large cell with strangers is an interesting social experience to say the least, and while they were wonderful people in general, more than a few times I heard tired old calls for human population decrease. We’re the virus. Degrowth’s critics have often been crude, ungenerous, or even wrong. I am thinking above all of Leigh Phillips, a writer who has effectively argued the children do, in fact, yearn for the mines, and written for the fascist rag Compact magazine. Ecomodernism (as one of the opposing positions is sometimes called) deserves better than this.