To Grow or Not To Grow

Lately, sustainability and all things related to it have been at the forefront of the business world. Companies have already realized that they need to take action in the name of sustainability, so they have been either paying consultants or putting together in-house teams on the path to determining their sustainability strategy, goals, targets, KPIs, and other related actions. This also pushed both companies and individuals to think about what sustainability really is and paved the way for lots of dichotomies. To name a couple: stakeholder-based economy vs. shareholder-based economy, money focus vs. impact focus, but the most divisive of these dichotomies is Growth vs. Degrowth.

Before delving deeper, let us define what Growth and Degrowth are. Growth in the business context typically refers to an increase in revenue, profits, market share, or other metrics that indicate expansion and progress. It is often seen as a fundamental objective for businesses, driven by the pursuit of increased productivity, innovation, and competitiveness in perpetuity. To remain viable, a business must perpetually strive for Growth, continuously generating potentially boundless wealth for its shareholders, and Growth-based approach is how most companies operate today. Degrowth on the other hand is a concept against perpetual economic Growth and advocates for a deliberate reduction in economic activity, consumption, and production. It entails prioritizing sustainability, environmental conservation, and social well-being over the relentless pursuit of profit and expansion. It questions the traditional notion that continuous Growth is necessary for prosperity and instead promotes alternative models of economic organization that prioritize quality of life, equity, and ecological balance. Degrowth enthusiasts argue that unchecked Growth leads to resource depletion, environmental degradation, and social inequalities, and advocate for strategies such as steady-state economies, circular economies, and localized production systems as alternatives to the Growth imperative. In other words, Degrowth emphasizes the finite nature of natural resources and aims to address socio-economic inequalities while prioritizing quality of life over material accumulation and promotes decentralized and localized economies, sustainable consumption and production patterns as well as political reforms to challenge growth-oriented policies to foster a transition towards a more equitable and sustainable society.

If we return to Growth and the current norms of doing business, we can easily say that the current way in which the business world operates is flawed. The business world focuses on constant and endless economic activity, consumption, and production which leaves little room for actors in it to do much else. Since the actors of the business world (either businesses or individuals) need to constantly hustle in the name of Growth, they do not have any time left to think about their actions as well as the consequences of their actions. It is not wrong to associate Growth with humans losing touch with their humanity as well as nature because hustling constantly means never stopping to ponder about the bigger picture, and when the business world does not see the bigger picture, they inevitably destroy everything in their path towards infinite wealth, a.k.a unchecked Growth. This is also why Degrowth enthusiasts have been correlating Growth with the destruction of all things whether human, human-made or natural (such as natural resources and animals). However, these enthusiasts forget the benefits of Growth in their stupor to diminish Growth and the mindset behind it. Humans have been around for about 200,00 years, but Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old, and industrialization commenced only in the 1800s. If we look from the 1800s to today, we can see that industrialization brought forward the mindset we correlate with Growth today, and thanks to this mindset humans have developed infinitely more in the past 200 or so years when compared to the 199,800 years before the industrialization. The economic and technological advances that came with industrialization brought a new kind of prosperity humans never witnessed before.

Therefore, one cannot simply disregard Growth as a destructive force that needs to cease existing and embrace Degrowth in its entirety. It should be everybody’s right to demand Growth in their lives because society and the economy are based on it. Without growth, an individual cannot develop, earn enough money to make a living, or form a family of their own; just like how a company would cease existing if it cannot reliably generate economic value for its shareholders. However, a distinction must be made here: Not every Growth has to be continuous, unchecked, or infinite; there could be a sustainable version of it. One should not just keep growing because they can; instead, one should regulate their growth so that they do not destroy everything in their path towards prosperity. Take the company Patagonia for example. In the company’s early years, it focused on infinite Growth because it simply could. The company was in everybody’s tongues, people all around the world wanted its products, and it wanted to ride this high, so instead of growing sustainably, it kept growing uncontrollably year in and year out without any regard for consequences. However, one year out of these infinite growth years, the company did not grow as much as it projected, and even though the company grew it came to the brink of bankruptcy just because the purchases were made according to infinite growth projections. The company managed to save itself (albeit with some losses), but in the end, it decided not to grow infinitely anymore; it decided to grow sustainably. Since then, Patagonia has been applying a sustainable Growth approach to its way of doing business, allowing the company to grow controllably and generate positive impact across the ecosystems it comes into touch with year in and year out.

Thus, neither Growth nor Degrowth is enough in its own. One cannot preach Degrowth because the society and economy depend on Growth; just like how one should not advocate for infinite Growth because it simply wreaks havoc on everything around it. Sure, there is a dichotomy of Growth vs. Degrowth, but this approach is just not right. Growth and Degrowth should not be enemies, they should be allies. They should compromise and meet in a common ground to figure out a way to grow sustainably so that humans and nature do not suffer in the long run.