Degrowth in the Financial Times

You can now read the letter that Giorgos Kallis and Joan Martinez Alier sent to the Financial Times in response to the article by Christopher Caldwell, in which they argue that Georgescu-Roegen was not any utopian thinker. Rather, they say, utopian is to think that endless growth is possible in a finite planet.

1. Degrowth in the Financial Times, Décroissance: how the French counter capitalism, By Christopher Caldwell - October 14, 2011

2. Letter in Response, No utopian but a truly worldly philosopher, By Profs Giorgos Kallis and Joan Martinez Alier - October 22, 2011

Sir, Christopher Caldwell, in "Décroissance: how the French counter capitalism"(October 15), refers correctly to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen as an intellectual hero of the degrowth (décroissance) movement, but qualifies him wrongly as a "utopian thinker'. Far from a utopian, Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994) was a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association and a professor of economics at Vanderbilt, holding a PhD in statistics from the Sorbonne and a degree in mathematics from his native Bucharest. As a Rockefeller scholar at Harvard he worked closely with notable economists Joseph Schumpeter and Wassily Leontief. Paul Samuelson called him a "scholar's scholar, an economist's economist".

A truly "worldly philosopher", Georgescu-Roegen in The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Harvard University Press, 1971) argued that economic growth increases entropy; useful energy is dissipated, it cannot be recycled. He predicted that the economy simply cannot continue to grow forever no matter how much technology advances. Once fossil-fuel stocks are depleted, a simpler living out of renewable, flow resources will be inevitable, and the descent had better be a smooth rather than a catastrophic one.

For his disciples in the community of ecological economics, the crisis came as no surprise: energy and food prices knocked the economy down. It is easy for the financial system to increase private or public debts and to confuse this expansion of credit for the creation of real wealth. But the real economy of energy and materials cannot be forced to grow at the compound interest rate necessary to pay off debts.

It is a hopeful sign that the degrowth movement is grounding its view of the economy on the thermodynamic analysis of Georgescu-Roegen. Utopian is to think that endless growth is possible in a finite planet.

Giorgos Kallis and Joan Martinez-Alier

ICTA, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain

Harvest of Harvests available in English and Spanish

Harvest of Harvests (30') is a documentary opened in 2008 that reflects on the role of peasant memory in imagining alternative futures. I did it with my sister Carla, who took care of the editing, and Gerard Marcó, responsible for the production (see his short movie Salm 51). The cinema director Isaki Lacuesta, winner of the Golden Shell in the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2011 for the film The double steps, helped me with the script. The original idea (and actually the main argument of the documentary) was by artist Perejaume, one of the characters of the film. If you happen to be in Barcelona I highly recommend you his retrospective exhibition in La Pedrera (opened until 25 February 2012), which brings together around two hundred works of the last twenty years around the idea of 'decreasing'.

You can now see Harvest of Harvests with English and Spanish subtitles through the links below. The original version in Catalan is available in this post.