No Growth is No Solution Either. A Critique of Degrowth and Post-Growth Approaches

In the face of climate change and other ecological problems, the degrowth and post-growth approaches are gaining more and more supporters. However, these growth-critical approaches have many problems. While the critique of growth is justified in many areas, the contraction or stagnation of production is associated with negative social and political consequences, as it would most likely lead to massive distributional conflicts. Moreover, a shrinking or stagnating GDP could make the necessary decarbonisation of the economy more difficult, because the investment required for decarbonisation would be much harder to implement in such an economy than in a growing economy.