Get Managing Without Growth: Slower By Design, Not Disaster Scripted By Peter A. Victor Hardcover

read chapters,,,.
Readedition as I was unable to find the more recent one,

Chapteris useful even if one has seen quite some histories of growth paradigm and the critiques thereof, The best bit was on HarrodDomar growth theory, a precursor to neoclassical growth theories, which, importantly, was interested in growth purely as a solution to unemployment.


The main part of the book is the last chapters, where Victor explicitly deals with how to manage without growth, His approach to making his argument is the following, He takes a country of interest for him, Canada,Shows that growth has not actually helped with some of the key social problems: poverty, inequality, unemployment,Offers a model of this country's economy chooses a subset of factors from which growth originates in his model:
supply: growth in investment, increases in prodty, pop growth,
demand: trade balance, growth in govt expenditure, growth in investment.

He then essentially decreases those, exogenously, to various extents, He shows that Canada's economy is growthdependent in the model in the sense that if one exogenously reduces growth factors and does nothing else the society goes into a deep crisis unemployment and poverty both shoot up.
The fundamental topic of the book is how to offer a coherent macroeconomic vision in which this growthdependency is transcended,
Thus in the "better" scenarios, Victor both reduces growth factors more gradually and more unevenly sometimes leaving investment to grow for longer, sometimes allowing net exports to be high for longer and complements that with what seems to bemain sets of interventions:

redistribution and working time reduction.
The result is that he shows that managing without growth is possible in the sense that unemployment and poverty are reduced all while growth drivers are tamed and then ultimately annulled.


In the following chapter he discusses in what concrete policies can those parameter changes materialize, One interesting discussion there is discussion of capital levy tax which according to some research discourages investment into physical capital and encourages investment into "human capital".
Another is that of foreign trade basically Victor effectively makes the case for trade deficits in the global north,

All in all, I think Victor's book, being a relatively pioneering one in this genre, has set a very useful precedent for how to argue for managing without growth in an economic framework.
One principal limitation here is that the proposed set of levers is very minimal, Instead of a bolder, and a more disaggregated plan, we rather see a "passive revolution", This is understandable given the overall goal that is set: can we in principle, and over a rather relaxed time horizon, imagine that a society like Canada stops being growthdependent Victor answers in affirmative.
Except that at the very end of the book he hints at the problem of "postgrowth in one country", i, e. that capital may flee and a smooth passive revolution turns into a not very passive counterrevolution,

Some other issues include questionable belief in the power of pricingbased environmental policies see critique e, g. here: sitelink phenomenalworld. org/analy , attention to emissions only not to other biophysical inputs and outputs, quite orthodox understanding of the nature of monetarily sovereign state and consequent concern with government deficit and debt/gdp ratio see those paragraphs on how Canada could alleviate poverty and "still run a budget surplus".
Lastly, I think nowadays in countries like Canada, the "bullshit jobs" critique must be taken into account: if many people do not really do anything useful in these countries nowadays despite being quite lucratively employed, then contrary to Victor's and most models, it is simply not true that any reduction of aggregate working hours means that the "pie" is smaller.
Since his models concern themselves primarily with how to manage the postgrowth transition without shocks to a pie, the bullshit jobs issue could help with that.


And lastlylastly, we should all know by now that places like Canada should degrow their througput and it is this with which they should concern themselves, not just with managing without growth.
A lot of great information on economic theory and what needs to be done in order to avert climate disaster, Was lighter on simulation work than I was hoping, Some interesting ideas but very academic writing, Aroused my interest enough for me to read more on the topic Brilliant!

Peter Victor spends the first few chapters explaining why the pursuit of economic growth is a flawed goal, for increasingly evident environmental reasons and for reasons of diminishing social wellbeing as well.
It encourages status anxiety, and a treadmill of production and consumption which often leads us away from more meaningful goals,

He takes us through his simulation model, HappyGrow, which models the impact of economic growth on happiness when status considerations are taken into account.
Something mainstream economists completely ignore, Admittedly, it was a very simple twoperson model, but the results were interesting, showing a neverending “race to compete” via increasing levels of consumption in situations of inequality.
It also showed the beneficial effect of introducing public goods into the mix, which allowed increasing levels of utility happiness to occur indefinitely.
This was interesting work which I had never seen the likes of before, Of course, the results could well be challenged on the basis of the shape of the marginal utility functions chosen, and the small number of actors, but such a debate would be welcome to open up the current tightly constrained orthodox marginal utility paradigm which promotes endless consumerism.


In a subsequent chapter he discusses his LowGrow simulation model, designed to explore the impact of various low growth policies on poverty, unemployment, GDP per capita and greenhouse gas emissions.
He also includes changes to public debt to GDP, and some assumptions about fiscal policy eg reduced taxes when public debt diminishes which may be historically correct, but are not necessarily aligned with best practice macroeconomic management.
The reason for this is that the Canadian government is a sovereign currencyissuing government, and hence can never “go broke”, Fiscal policy is more appropriately targeted at macroeconomic factors such as unemployment and the need to maintain demand in the economy at an economically sustainable level.
The model assumes inflationary pressures when unemployment goes belowper cent, but this is based on an orthodox NAIRU NonAccelerating Rate of Unemployment assumption, which can be countered by introducing a publicly funded Job Guarantee into the mix.


I would recommend that the author acquaint himself with Modern Monetary Theory, and its protagonists such as Warren Mosler, Stephanie Kelton and William Mitchell.
It is a much more progressive model of macroeconomics more suited to todays monetary world and to meeting the aims of steering the economy towards ecological sustainability and socially just outcomes.


The LowGrow simulation model outcomes are used to demonstrate that addressing poverty and unemployment, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions, are all possible while still maintaining a good standard of living for Canadians.
The best model for doing this entailed reducing the working week, installing a carbon tax ofper ton, redistributing incomes to reduce inequality, increasing government investment in literacy and health care, and reducing the levels of other investment by business and government to reduce material throughput.


A number of the equations for the simulation model were given at the end of the chapter, but some seemed to be missing, eg I could not find how unemployment was calculated.
The author tells us that the full model can be accessed at his website, pvictor, com, but I have not checked this out as yet,

The last few chapters were probably the most interesting to me, They discussed a range of policy measures that could be introduced to restrain growth, Stabilising population and in particular reducing immigration was an important one, which I was glad to see he had the courage to address.
It is a tricky topic which many otherwise environmentally aware commentators shy away from due to fears of being labelled racist, which has constrained debate on this important topic.


Policies on limiting throughput were discussed, as per Herman Dalys principles of ecological economics, also investment, productivity, and technology and consumption.
Many of these policies would be anathema to mainstream economists and politicians, but they would actually have the counterintuitive effect of making the average persons life better.
It would entail a significant reshaping of community aspirations, however, and he discusses the difficulty in doing this, His hopes seem to rest on a grassroots movement promoting voluntary simplicity and localisation of economies, which he believes could help stimulate this change in our value system.


I wish I could feel so sure, but nevertheless I applaud his attempt to address the trickier sociopolitical dimensions of this type of systemic change.
His book is an important step along the way to opening eyes to an alternative to the destructive treadmill of mindless economic growth which we are on in developed economies.
.