Read the full transcript of environmentalist and economist Gaya Herrington’s talk titled “Will the End of Economic Growth Come by Design — or Disaster?” at TED Talks 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Concept of “Enough” and Economic Transformation
Let’s contemplate the word “enough,” because I think it will play an important role going forward. When I watch the news or scroll my feeds, I keep coming back to the same questions. Why, despite all our knowledge and innovation, do problems like poverty and pollution keep plaguing humanity? Why, despite astonishing advances in renewable energy and resource efficiency, is fossil fuel use at an all-time high, as is our global ecological footprint? And why, despite being responsible for the main part of that footprint, have rich countries been experiencing stagnating, if not decreasing, well-being?
I’m a sustainability researcher with a background in econometrics, and I believe the answer lies in the fact that solving poverty, caring for nature or fostering well-being is not the ultimate goal of our current economic system. Its goal is growth.
The Historical Context of Growth
Many take this for granted. But growth wasn’t considered a moral goal for most of history. It was only officially measured around the middle of last century through GDP. It then shifted into the core of our economic thinking and from there into policymaking and our collective psyche. Growth became synonymous with progress.
Things went fast after that. Extinction rates went up, resource use and waste exploded. Some warned early on about the dangers of exponential growth on a finite planet.
The Limits to Growth Study
In 1972, a team of MIT scientists created a first-of-its-kind world model consisting of over 200 interconnected variables. With it, they analyzed the question I mentioned earlier: why problems like poverty and pollution persist.
They published a book on their findings called “The Limits to Growth,” in which they warned that continuing the business-as-usual growth pursuit would lead to societal breakdown, setting in around now.
Breakdown doesn’t mean the end of humanity, but a steep decline in well-being nonetheless. The book was a bestseller, but you may have never heard of it. The authors were derided as doomsayers and their message, over time, buried.
Current Analysis and Findings
A few years back, I compared their now decades-old projections with what’s happened since. I found empirical data closely aligning with the model’s business-as-usual scenario, which shows growth grinding to a halt around 2040 or so, followed by steep declines in things like food production and well-being.
My analysis also revealed that this breakdown could be avoided by letting go of the growth pursuit and redirecting resources to meet human needs and protect nature directly. This indicates that what we do in the next few years will determine our well-being for the rest of this century. And this now-or-never moment in history is up to us.
The Myth of Decoupling
Technology by itself will not save us, despite aspirational talks of decoupling, the idea that the economy can grow without resource use and pollution growing along with it. There’s no decoupling, certainly not for a full impact on the Earth. Raw materials consumption has been around 1.2 kilograms per dollar GDP for two decades, while biodiversity loss, water scarcity, plastic pollution are all worsening.
But even just considering carbon emissions, which per dollar GDP have decreased, sufficient, absolute decoupling, which is what we’d need, is nowhere in the data.
The Concept of “Enough”
Our choice isn’t whether to keep growing or not. It’s whether the end of growth will come by design or disaster. Either we choose our own limits, or we’ll have them forced upon us. Now that humankind has reached global, unparalleled power, “Limits to Growth” confronts us with a question we’ve never faced before: Who do we want to be, and what world do we want to live in?
Here’s where “enough” comes in. If I were to describe the mantra we need in the 21st century with one word, it would be “enough.” “Enough” as in “no more.” This is the limit. Say, a planetary boundary. And enough as in “sufficient,” juxtaposing it to this exhausting grind for ever more and instead invoking a notion of sharing, as in “enough for each.”
The Well-being Economy
I believe the only realistic plan to avoid breakdown and maintain global well-being lies in this mindset shift from “never enough” to “enough for each.” Change the goal of our economic system from growth to human and ecological well-being. A well-being economy.
What would that look like? We have an idea because we already pretend that’s what we have. No vision statement reads: “A world where growth perpetuates at all costs indefinitely.” It talks about how this organization contributes to society, because that’s what we feel it should do.
Implementing the Well-being Economy
In a well-being economy, business activities, government policies and citizen behavior are aimed at meeting our physical, social and spiritual needs within planetary boundaries. It doesn’t mean we’re anti-growth, it just means we’re more selective about it. We differentiate between what should and should not grow, depending on whether it contributes to well-being.
This implies different pathways towards a well-being economy for low- and high-income countries. At small material footprints, growth more often correlates with well-being, including through poverty reduction. So poorer countries below their share of Earth’s carrying capacity may still need green growth, economic expansion driven by clean technologies. In richer countries, what has decoupled from growth is happiness, so they can and should focus on reducing ecological footprints to sustainable levels while safeguarding everyone’s livelihood by sharing more equally.
Addressing Misconceptions
Let me stress because I hear this misconception a lot. Decentering growth doesn’t mean shrinking the economy until it crashes. It means reducing our environmental impact to within a safe operating space for life as we know it. That’s not going back to a poorer past. That’s changing the forward direction away from a cliff.
We’ll still have houses with fridges, good schools, health care, profitable businesses. We’ll go to jobs and parties. But social norms and economic dynamics will change. We’ll redefine what has value or what work we call productive.
The Benefits of Change
With our needs securely met, this trade-off between social and environmental benefits, which we often take as given, dissolves. Sharing more equally means less income and wealth inequality, improving social cohesion and reducing wasteful, conspicuous consumption. Efficiency gains are used to work less instead of produce more.
By not pursuing growth at all costs, we can avoid a lot of costs, like all the expenditure on health care and cleanups due to pollution. Moving to a post-growth society isn’t choosing permanent recession. It’s flexing our free will to change our notion of prosperity from ever more to better.
Current Progress and Possibilities
How probable is this economic transformation? It’s feasible. That’s half the answer. We know what promotes well-being. In fact, policies like zero tolerance on child poverty or GDP alternatives are exchanged already in WIEGO, a partnership of self-proclaimed well-being governments.
Dozens of cities are piloting post-growth frameworks to operate within explicit social and environmental boundaries, with practices like universal basic incomes. I love how companies that put people and planet legally above profit generate billions each year. How communities are taking back stewardship of their commons with co-ops and renewable energy, water or food. Or how recent experiments with shorter workweeks for the same pay were so successful that most of those companies made it permanent.
Technology’s Role
We also have the technological capabilities, which will be pivotal, once directed towards the right goal. This redirection is indispensable. But of course, I’m regularly told the techno-optimist argument that it’s not. And I always respond.
Let’s say we could replace the dying bee colonies with robot pollinators. Why do that if we can also advance regenerative agriculture, which doesn’t cause insecticide? Why dedicate our innovative powers to tree-planting drones when we can also use that thinking to redesign our economy so that existing forest isn’t cut down?
The Promise of Change
And that brings me to the other half of the answer, to how probable a well-being economy is. It’s promise. We’d have less stuff, but more of what we need. Connection. Maintaining a sense of community and purpose is hard in this current economic system, which treats us as selfish, never satisfied consumers.
Research shows we’re not just capable of caring for life, we derive joy and meaning from it. We can’t be truly happy unless those around us thrive too. This economic transformation wouldn’t be a capitulation to grim necessity. We’d want to do it even if we were not facing ecosystem collapse, because a well-being economy fits much better who we want to be and a world we long to live in.
Conclusion
So we started with these global problems and found that changing our economic system is imperative, but also feasible. And no sacrifice, but simply a letting go of what’s no longer serving us to find belonging in a post-growth world of embraced interdependence. If that sounds spiritual, that’s what a well-being economy delivers. Physical sufficiency, social abundance and spiritual wealth, including the peace of mind that this prosperity can last.
LOGAN MCCLURE DAVDA: Thank you, Gaya. So you spoke tonight about broader economic transformation. But what can we as individuals do?
GAYA HERRINGTON: Yes. You have to find your unique influence in the system. So that starts by changing the system’s narrative. We’ve been told the story of separation. We are selfish, violent beings, doomed to exploit our commons, so the best thing we can hope for then is technology to save us.
So you would have to start by working from a different narrative: the story of interdependence, in which we are nature. Once our needs are securely met, we rejoice in contributing to this web of life that we’re all part of.
So you talk about bringing it back to the personal level. That’s actually very emotional work. It’s deeply personal. But of course, it cannot stay there. So then the next step is to build out this new narrative in the system’s structures.
And that very much depends on where you are. If you’re in a corporation, look into regenerative business models. If you’re in government, look into well-being government policies. If you’re an investor, see if you can transition from ESG assessments, which are relative, to the absolute assessments against social foundations and planetary boundaries. If you’re an entrepreneur, look into employee ownership. Everyone, citizens, buy at not-for-profit companies. See if community solar makes sense for you.
So there’s so many things that you can do, but it very much depends on where you are. But there is one general piece of advice that I can give, and that’s: work together. And remember that systems change is not linear. People do this very disjointedly at first, and then over time they build connections until a critical minority mass is reached, typically around 25 percent or so. And only then does the majority come along because the system change becomes self-reinforcing.
Now there’s no guarantee that that will happen for the economic transformation that I’m proposing, but if it does, it will have been because people like you that are gathered here today contributed to that change in their own unique way. So thank you for listening.
