How Much Growth Is Required to Achieve Good Lives for All

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* Article: How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan. World Development Perspectives, Volume 35, September 2024, 100612

URL = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

"Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments."


Abstract

"Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach the levels of GDP per capita that currently characterise high-income countries. However, this would require increasing total global output and resource use several times over, dramatically exacerbating ecological breakdown. Furthermore, universal convergence along these lines is unlikely within the imperialist structure of the existing world economy. Here we demonstrate that this dilemma can be resolved with a different approach, rooted in recent needs-based analyses of poverty and development. Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries. With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large increases in total global throughput and output. Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to provision public services, to deploy efficient technology, and to build sovereign industrial capacity in the global South."


Excerpt

From the conclusion, by Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan:

"Narratives that assume deprivation can only be eliminated if all countries achieve the levels of GDP per capita that presently characterize high-income countries are increasingly at odds with ecological reality and ignore the real constraints that developing countries face within the existing structure of the capitalist world economy. Fortunately, research on needs-based poverty and development advances important alternative solutions, and resolves the false dilemma between human well-being and ecology. The question of how much production is necessary to end poverty cannot be answered by assessing PPP-based incomes or aggregate GDP. It is necessary to assess what is being produced, and whether people have access to necessary goods and services. Development strategy should focus on ensuring the efficient production of and universal access to the specific goods that people require to achieve decent lives and good social outcomes, including nutritious food, safe housing, healthcare, education, sanitation, transit, information technology, and household durables. This can be done while also reducing less-necessary forms of production, particularly in high-income countries, in order to bring resource use back to sustainable levels. For a discussion of how such a transformation can be financed, see Olk et al (2023).

Ending global poverty and ensuring good lives for all while meeting ecological objectives at the same time requires a new framework for conceptualizing convergence. Excess energy and material use must decline in the core to achieve ecological objectives, while in the periphery productive capacities must be reclaimed, reorganized, and in most cases increased to meet human needs and achieve human development objectives, with throughput converging globally to levels that are sufficient for universal well-being and compatible with ecological stability.

For the core, this requires sufficiency-oriented strategies (reducing less-necessary forms of production and consumption, extending product lifespans, reducing the purchasing power of the rich, transitioning from private cars to public transit, etc.), while improving and securing access to necessary goods and services, alongside efficiency improvements and feasible technological change. These strategies can enable high-income countries to decarbonize fast enough to stay within their fair-shares of Paris-compliant carbon budgets (Vogel & Hickel 2023). This is challenging within a capitalist market economy, however, because capital generally requires increasing aggregate output (GDP) to stabilize accumulation (Magdoff & Foster 2011; Gordon & Rosenthal 2003; Binswanger, 2009, Binswanger, 2015, Hahnel, 2013) and because in capitalist economies any reduction of aggregate output triggers social crises characterized by mass layoffs and unemployment. Furthermore, under capitalism, decisions about production are made by wealthy investors with the primary goal of maximizing private profits, rather than meeting social and ecological goals. Necessary goods and services that are not profitable are often underproduced (e.g., Christophers 2022). Post-capitalist approaches are therefore needed, including public finance for urgently necessary forms of production (e.g., public transit, renewable energy, insulation, efficient appliances), establishing universal public services to ensure access to necessary goods, planning to reduce less-necessary output in a just and equitable way, and guaranteeing universal access to employment and livelihoods through a public job guarantee and income floor (Olk et al 2023; Durand et al., 2024, Foster, 2023).

For the global South, a different set of challenges must be overcome. During the past forty years, developing economies have been structured – by policies imposed by international financial institutions and foreign capital – to focus production on exports to the core in subordinate positions within global commodity chains, at artificially depressed prices and with unfavourable terms of trade, while remaining dependent on imports of necessary technologies and capital goods (Smith 2016). As a result of this arrangement, labour, land and resources in the global South are devoted to producing, say, fast fashion and consumer technologies for Northern firms – overwhelmingly consumed in the global North – instead of producing nutritious food, housing, sanitation systems and hospitals for national needs. To reclaim productive capacities for national development, governments need to use progressive industrial and fiscal policy, public works programmes, and public investment in innovation to plan production of necessary goods, services and technologies (Hickel & Sullivan 2023). At present, these steps are largely precluded by the conditions imposed by structural adjustment programmes and international creditors. Escaping these constraints requires reducing dependence on imports from the core – and therefore on foreign capital – including through South-South trade and swap lines, and cancelling external debts where necessary. Southern governments can and should take unilateral or collective steps toward sovereign industrial development and should be supported toward this end (Ajl, 2021, Hickel, 2021, Kaboub, 2008, Sylla, 2023).

Poverty is not an intractable problem that requires complex solutions, long timeframes and large increases in production and throughput that conflict with ecological objectives. The solution is straightforward. We need to actively plan to shift productive capacities away from capital accumulation and elite consumption in order to focus instead on the goods and services that are necessary to meet human needs and enable decent living for all, while ensuring universal access through public provisioning systems. We have framed this work around the concept of human needs, following the recent literature. However it is important to underscore that this approach is ultimately about far more than just satisfying material requirements for human well-being. Achieving decent-living for all is critical to enabling broader human capabilities, individual and collective self-realisation, full participation in society and politics and, ultimately, freedom."

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493)


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