The Church Of Eternal Growth
A new study about green growth is a reminder that our current crises descend from our preference for ideology over reality.
What happens to a society that becomes trapped in its own ignorance? That's a question explored by Russian director Alexei Roman in his 2013 film Hard To Be A God. In the film, three scientists find themselves on the planet Arkanar, which is almost identical to Earth, except that human civilisation stopped progressing at some point in the Medieval period. The scientists learn that that's because anyone identified as an intellectual is immediately killed by the dung-smeared locals.
For many reasons, Hard To Be A God is a hard watch. The script is a non-sequitous morass; the Russian dialogue has been redubbed so it feels like it's taking place in your head; the black and white visuals are surreal and aggressively repulsive. Roman's portrayal of the revolting squalor and filth in which his characters writhe and gibber stains you in perpetuity. Hard To Be A God is truly a horrifyingly blunt skewering of the human hankering for self-imposed ignorance.
The film perfectly encapsulates the wanton depravity of the 2025 Trump presidency. From its ending of climate research at NOAA to its assault on universities and education in general; from the ludicrous assertion that RFK Jr is going to discover the cause of autism, to its ever-intensifying campaign of bigoted cruelty against minorities, Trump 2.0 looks like a federal-level attempt to load civilisation into a trebuchet and fling it into the 9th century. It’s all-too-literal a realisation of Carl Sagan’s 1996 warning that, in a society based on science and technology, our “combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces”; that “if we are not able to ask skeptical questions” then “we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along”.
But while Trump's assault on expertise is a manifestation of the most extreme anti-intellectualism, it exists on a spectrum with subtler forms of ideological blindness and an unwillingness to question answers. Even in academia's highest towers, where reason and evidence are deemed to reign supreme, deeply held beliefs regularly supplant empirical reality. And as new research suggests, this tendency toward comfortable myths over uncomfortable truths isn't limited to populist politics—it can shape the thinking of even our most educated experts.
Lost In The Salsa Verde
The power of ideology was recalled this month by a new study titled "Green growth beliefs”, which came to some nuanced yet unnerving conclusions about what smart people choose to believe. The study surveyed about 3,000 high-level researchers across different academic disciplines about their belief in the idea that economic growth can be environmentally sustainable. The study authors—who include Naomi Oreskes, writer of Merchants of Doubt, an influential book about science disinformation—found significant differences of opinion between fields, with economists strongly endorsing green growth (74%) while earth scientists were more skeptical (41%).
This result might not have been especially noteworthy were it not for a further finding: that the strongest predictor for believing in green growth is a belief, held most strongly among economists, that "continued GDP growth is essential for human well-being", a link that the authors note is "academically contested". This is an understatement: increasingly, we’re learning that such a belief is not sustained by scientific observation. The authors stress: "It is not clear if green growth is possible. But the importance of this topic is undeniable, because many influential policies are based on green growth beliefs."
The implication here is that top economists favour green growth not as a result of analysis of the available evidence, but as a result of convention, or intellectual path dependency. After all, growth has been the bedrock of economics as a discipline since at least the time of Adam Smith, who died in 1790. Since that time, the primacy of growth as an objective in and of itself has seldom been challenged—and where it has, those challenges have been buried. Meanwhile, as the present study and others show, non-economists overwhelmingly reject green growth as a viable way forward.
As serendipity would have it, the writer, broadcaster and erstwhile economist Katy Shields details this problem in her vital new series "How captured economics stole our climate — and what we can do about it". Drawing on her personal journey into and out of academic and professional economics, Shields shows that, in its bandwagonism and its cripplingly chauvinistic adherence to dogma, the field has failed us all. Blind obedience to a creed has seldom benefitted humanity: as Hard To Be A God illustrates, a society that drowns its dissenting voices upside-down in the communal latrine remains, at best, arrested in its development.
Katy Shields
It’s The System, Stupid
To be clear, critiques of economics and of society are not—or at least don’t have to be—criticisms of economists as individuals. If you’ve grown up being told there’s only one way to plant wheat, thatch a roof or fletch an arrow, who are you to question your elders? Moreover, it’s not like the budding economists of the 20th century were presented with a great number of radically different competing theories—save perhaps for Marxism, which isn’t a critique of economic growth anyway. In a field that has historically tolerated no unbeliever, along with a devout Inquisition in the form of the media, it’s not surprising that only recently, as civilisation has begun to show signs of unravelling, have alternative theories started to gain broader attention.
To this end, the "green growth beliefs" study cites two alternatives to growth-centred pathways: agrowth, which is an economics that is agnostic about the role of growth and focuses on other metrics; and degrowth, which calls for planned reductions in energy and resource use. There now exists a range of non-growth movements, with degrowth currently being the best-known, and works such as Doughnut Economics offering holistic, non-growth visions of a sustainable future within planetary boundaries. It is to be hoped that these visions lead to a broader unfettering of the human imagination across generations, fostering workable, cohesive frameworks for getting stuff done.
But here again, we see the nascent status of “growth alternatives” reinforcing support for convention: compared with agrowth and degrowth, there's assumed to be a good deal more observational evidence—or something resembling it—for green growth. This, that assumption runs, makes green growth far more politically palatable. As a result, many countries are (or claim to be) adopting green growth strategies, while no major economy appears to be attempting an agrowth or degrowth trajectory (though it is worth mentioning that several smaller jurisdictions are trying out alternatives, such as the many cities delving into the Doughnut). These latter pathways are, as far as most policymakers are concerned, entirely novel approaches for which there aren’t analogues or models to follow.
However, there are also more optimistic interpretations of these currents. For one, scholars like Timothy Parrique and Beth Stratford have suggested that green growthers might not, in practice, be quite as opposed to agrowth or degrowth principles as they claim to be. In a useful 2020 article on the green growth/degrowth debate, Stratford points out that many of the positions of the green growthers and degrowthers are not antithetical, and that when pressed, some fervent green growthers admit that growth agnosticism is quite a good idea.
Moreover, it is worth considering the possibility that the rise of post-growth frameworks may be exerting a variant of the radical flank effect, whereby perceived “extreme” factions draw the middle toward less orthodox positions. Without such an effect, wouldn’t the mere possibility of the European Parliament’s 2023 “Beyond Growth” conference have been inconceivable? Post-growth thought might not yet have hit the mainstream, but as we encounter more and more of growth's limits, and break more of the planet's boundaries, these are ideas that will only grow in appeal.
Forgive Them, For They Know Not What They Do
So perhaps the findings revealed by the “Green growth beliefs” paper are not really about economics at all, but rather illustrate the human tendency to preserve existing beliefs in the face of evidence—or even less remarkably, the propensity of people to say what they think is socially acceptable.
For such a wonderfully imaginative species, when lumped together humans can be astonishingly unimaginative. The phrase "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism", attributed variously to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, strikes at the heart of this issue. Our social and cultural programming has been so effective that many of us truly cannot conceive of a different way of organising things. At its most fundamental level, this conception of how things ought to work was built around even more deeply rooted elements of Western belief—most notably Christianity, which from the jump establishes a hierarchy that places humanity above nature, men above women, and God in his infinite mystery above all. Such foundational belief frameworks render their adherents vulnerable to replicating such structures. As Katy Shields and others have pointed out, this patriarchy is hardwired into mainstream economics, blinkering it whilst turning it into a weapon of oppression. Nature and all its blessings, meanwhile, are quite literally discounted.
It should be emphasised that this isn’t the only connection economics has with faith. In trying to become a science, economics paradoxically took on the status of a religion—a phenomenon traced by scholars such as John Ralston Saul, who shows that the fetishization of science and reason has directly served unreasonable, irrational ends. Twentieth century economists like Paul Samuelson knew that, in penning such works as Foundations of Economic Analysis, they were lending to their field scientific-seeming legitimacy. They may not, however, have fully apprehended the significance of this act, which was to strengthen mainstream belief in the Dismal Science, to the benefit of those whom our economics has always benefitted, and the detriment of the majority that it has not.
We may never know how deeply the scions of 20th century economics pondered L. Ron Hubbard’s dictum, “if you want to get rich, you start a religion.” But, late as it may be, perhaps we’re finally seeing an exodus from the Church of Eternal Growth.
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Also this week: not everyone appreciated it, but I led an article on the Copernicus European State of the Climate 2024 report with an explosive quote from the great climatologist Friederike Otto:
David Vetter
