Zero Growth?
The original (Spanish) version of this article can be found here.
A few days ago, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown published an article in The Guardian about the rise of the far right and the connection between the deep dissatisfaction gripping society and zero growth.
"Having lived through a decade of consistently low growth, the [European] continent is now divided between a shrinking, optimistic minority that still clings to the expectation that a rising tide will lift all boats, and a growing, more pessimistic majority that now sees life as a zero-sum game."
I have to admit I’m genuinely fascinated by how little attention this phenomenon—this enormous elephant in the room—receives from the media and public debate.
Because anyone giving it a moment’s thought can see that what Brown points to is precisely the monster looming over 21st-century society: nobody believes in the return of the 20th-century dream of prosperity anymore—but we don’t have a new ideal to replace it either.
That small minority still hoping the tide will rise again is the status quo, clinging to talk of reindustrialization and job security for life because, frankly, they can’t think of anything else.
Brown suggests Europe should follow Biden’s lead in the U.S. Joe Biden saw the monster coming when white middle-class voters in the American Midwest stopped voting Democrat due to a lack of vision for the future in the face of industrial decline. His solution—the same one we've used for the last hundred years, and which has worked in the past—was to throw more fuel on the fire. Under his leadership, the U.S. has reinvested heavily in infrastructure and reindustrialization, as if it were going out of fashion, and has managed to keep the economy afloat and employment at record highs.
And yet, voter support for the Democrats hasn’t shifted significantly. The proposed solution doesn’t seem to resonate with the majority.
Because in history, there are no useful “re-”s—and ordinary people know this perfectly well. What’s more, most people don’t even want to go back to the old plan of spending 40 years working split shifts as a shop assistant. It’s not just that we can’t go back. We don’t want to.
The mistake lies in the premise: assuming we’re in a zero-growth scenario. This idea is born from a concept of growth that only acknowledges what industrial economics knows how to measure.
During the Industrial Revolution, an endless list of activities moved from the private sphere into the market: clothes stopped being made at home, birthing the fashion industry; childcare left the family and became daycare and preschool; education was pulled out of guilds and formalized; elder care moved to nursing homes; hand-washing clothes gave way to mass-produced washing machines; homes were heated by fuels that had to be purchased, not gathered; families stopped growing their own vegetables or baking their own bread. Each task that left the home generated demand for jobs in factories, shops, and public services.
To produce all this, we tapped into natural resources that had never before been included in any accounting books. Mines, oil fields, farmland, and—most of all—urban land were incorporated into national balance sheets. Today, two-thirds of the world’s total wealth is “stored” in land. That’s no small detail.
So, was the world growing? Or was it simply shifting the satisfaction of needs from a part of life that economics didn’t measure into one that it did? A bit of both. But the result was that the industrial era recorded average growth rates of about 2%.
What’s happening now is the reverse: the economy is measuring less and less because people—especially those of us who came of age with the Internet and much less purchasing power—are meeting more and more needs (like learning, leisure, entertainment, decision-making, or achieving social status) outside of markets. And this shift creates an illusion—an optical illusion of stagnation—even as life changes and evolves faster than ever.
Because, of course, the world is changing. It is growing. For starters, we are universalizing education—learning today is accessible to anyone, even if it doesn’t show up in GDP. For far less than what we used to pay for a few CDs, we now have access to all the information, music, documentaries, and books we could ever want. Even if it doesn’t show up in GDP.
People travel more, explore more, discover more than anyone 40 years ago could have imagined. Even if it doesn’t show up in GDP. Thanks to the massive spread of information, many physical processes have become so affordable that they’re now accessible to almost everyone—like having a bank account. Even so-called “artificial intelligence” is the child of academic collaboration, not market-driven R&D.
Only from the viewpoint of a European middle class that understood progress exclusively through material ownership—and expected to follow the same trajectory forever—does it make sense to believe that growth has disappeared.
In other words, it’s not that growth doesn’t exist. It’s that “growth”—society’s progress—is happening outside the things the economy knows how to measure. Industrial economics is no longer enough to explain the world. And maybe it never was, but as long as it reflected the ways our lives were improving, it got away with it. Now it’s useless—and it’s only going to get worse.
Two massive tensions emerge from this shift. One: as the spread of information pulls more and more things out of the market, fewer and fewer things remain “investable.” There are fewer companies that require big capital investments and produce predictable returns. So capital has moved en masse to the one place where it still expects endless returns: housing.
As a result, housing has gone from representing about 7% of a family’s lifetime income to around 40%. Beyond its impact on people’s lives, the tragedy of this trend is that housing doesn’t generate jobs—it simply fattens the cycle of capital > profit > capital. It reinvests solely to extract rent.
The more money we spend on housing, the fewer good jobs exist—a vicious cycle that never ends. This, not a lack of growth, is what’s fueling the feeling of scarcity. And it’s fascinating—or not—that no one’s talking about it.
Second: all the while, we continue demanding that people build their lives within this shrinking economy. This is the crisis of the generation that came of age in the 2000s. We’re expected to achieve what our parents had—or more—in an economy that’s smaller and more extractive than ever. Meanwhile, the activity we carry out outside the economy—the way we naturally live in the world—isn’t even recognized by society’s measuring stick. The result? An overwhelming sense of scarcity and a lack of future.
The way out of this vicious cycle lies in preventing speculation from continuing to extract unearned rents. But the real key will be imagining a new society where industrialized work is no longer at the center of life. That’s why we need an agenda that ensures all the things that can be abundant in the 21st century are accessible to everyone.
As Arthur C. Clarke, screenwriter of 2001: A Space Odyssey, once said:
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play.”