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The Radical Ideology Behind “Degrowth”

Blog Post | Economic Growth

The Radical Ideology Behind “Degrowth”

Unpacking the call for less.

Summary: The degrowth movement advocates for an economic and philosophical shift away from capitalism’s growth paradigm, arguing that continuous growth is unsustainable for the planet. It proposes a cultural overhaul that challenges capitalism and promotes a no-growth economy to preserve resources. Degrowth misinterprets the nature of capitalism and resources, overlooking the role of human innovation and voluntary exchange in creating sustainable progress.


You might see trouble when you look at power outages, declining birth rates and exorbitant grocery prices. Certain intellectuals and environmentalists, however, see something so wonderful that they had to create a word for it: Degrowth.

In the 2014 book Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, a collection of European thinkers presented an ideological movement that aimed to overturn the “growth paradigm” and usher in “an economy of common feast for all sober individuals.” The movement relies heavily on arcane and fustian terminology such as “dépense,” “nowtopian,” “dematerialization,” “economic disobedience,” “post-normal science,” and the use of “imaginary” as a noun, while “degrowth” itself comes from the French coinage “décroissance.”

Despite their arcane terminology, the ideas are straightforward. Degrowthers claim that capitalism “requires and perpetuates growth” and that this growth imposes an unsustainable stress on the planet’s finite resources. This mindset must be eliminated, and it can be eliminated because, as the editors gnomically announce, “scarcity is social.”

Degrowth is not just a social, economic, or environmental policy critique. The movement represents a cultural and philosophical challenge to capitalism and free markets. To understand its appeal, we must examine the deeper philosophical roots that sustain its radical vision.

Marxist philosopher André Gorz coined the term “décroissance” in 1972, drawing from the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, which outlined the planet’s purported ecological limits and suggested zeroing out economic growth to stop resource depletion.

Gorz, the Club of Rome (which made headlines in 2016 by calling for a one-child policy in the developed world), and others claimed that global ecological stability was fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.

“Is the earth’s balance,” asked Gorz, “for which no-growth — or even degrowth — of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system?” Gorz assumed that his perception of “the earth’s balance” required that growth to end.

Contemporary degrowthers embrace the same fundamental error. First, they (and other green philosophers) stipulate a highly debatable definition of “the earth’s balance.” Second, at its core, capitalism does not have a singular goal of perpetual growth. Instead, capitalism is a social system rooted in the principles of individual freedom, where people can pursue their self-interests and make decisions based on rational judgments.

Capitalism does not have goals or desires of its own; it is not a conscious actor but a framework that facilitates the voluntary exchange of goods and services, innovation, and the creation of value. The growth paradigm criticized by degrowthers is not imposed by a framework of rules. It is the natural outcome of individuals acting freely and rationally to improve their circumstances. Profit is not a result of coercion or an insatiable drive to accumulate wealth but a reflection of one’s ability to provide goods and services that others value.

Degrowth scholars also argue that competition pressures businesses to grow, because a company that chooses to forego higher profits would lose market share and go out of business. They contend that the drive creates a relentless cycle of accumulation, where companies must continuously grow or face decline.

However, this critique fails to recognize that the motivation to compete is not an external force. Instead, business owners have a rational desire to improve their well-being. People compete to innovate, provide better services or products, and enhance their material circumstances. Competition is not a coercive system that demands growth for its own sake. It is a mechanism that rewards those who can meet consumer needs more effectively and efficiently.

The degrowth movement also misunderstands natural resources by making the same flawed ecological assumptions made by neo-Malthusian biologists. They believe the planet has finite resources and that growth must inevitably lead to unsustainable resource depletion.

Natural resources are not fixed amounts of matter. They are defined by their utility to human ends. While a fixed number of atoms produce natural resources, there are limitless ways those atoms can be organized to satisfy human needs. That is the reality that defines a resource. “The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge,” said the late economist Julian Simon. “The brakes are our lack of imagination.”

Understanding the philosophical motivations behind the degrowth movement helps to outline the potential impacts of the movement’s plans. As with the attitudes and policy proposals of the Deep Ecologists and other progressive green movements, degrowth would fundamentally undermine the structure and philosophies that established Western society. By misunderstanding humanity’s role in the natural environment and the essential nature of free market systems, degrowthers also recommend policy solutions that would do far more harm than the problem they claim to solve.

This article was published by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on 9/20/2024.

Blog Post | Economic Growth

What Unifies the Enemies of Civilization?

Socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism all have one thing in common.

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Summary: Anti-merit, authoritarian, collectivist ideas like socialism, environmental extremism, and doomerism are enemies of human progress because they impede innovation, limit personal freedom, and prevent societal growth. Fostering decentralized creativity, by contrast, improves the continued ability of human civilization to advance.


We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas.

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded . . . blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.

Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract dogmas . . . luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Our enemy is speech control and thought control—the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual . . .

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.

Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death . . .

We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.

We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.

We invite everyone to join us . . .

The water is warm.

Become our allies in the pursuit of technology, abundance, and life.

—Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

Although our society is becoming more dynamic over time, some creativity-suppressing memes that had dominated our static ancestors survive to this day, albeit under different guises. As we saw, those memes ensured that societies like Sparta made practically no progress at all. Thankfully, in our time, such memes don’t stop us from improving our lives and the world more broadly. But they do slow us down, and if left unchecked, they could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We, therefore, have a duty not only to recognize them for the threat that they are but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.

Socialism advocates for centralized institutions, like States, to take the means of production away from citizens against their will. Socialists falsely assume that States can better allocate wealth in the form of consumer goods and services better than the private sector. But in the absence of free markets, States cannot determine prices and so cannot discover how resources can be best allocated. Resources like wood and gold could go toward producing all sorts of consumer goods, and market prices signal to entrepreneurs which resources should go into producing which consumer goods. That is, entrepreneurs use prices to “calculate” whether or not a particular venture will improve consumers’ lives. For instance, entrepreneurs might want to buy wood to build houses that they wish to sell. But they can only determine whether such a venture is profitable—that is, if it makes people better off—if they know the prices of the wood they’d buy and the houses they’d sell. But centralizing all of society’s resources into the hands of a single institution obliterates the possibility of prices. As economist Ludwig von Mises wrote, “The paradox of ‘planning’ is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.”

The impossibility of socialist-style central planning came to light in 1989, when Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Soviet Union, visited a grocery store in the United States. Back in Russia, people waited in line for food and other goods, but in the capitalist United States, Yeltsin could buy as much of any of the countless items he wanted, and the lines were nothing like they were back home. In recognition of the stark contrast, Yeltsin told some Russians who were with him that if Russians saw what American supermarkets were like, “there would be a revolution.”

Many socialists think that wealth is a fixed pie. They see rich people and poor people and think that such inequality is unfair or unjust. Because they think wealth is fixed, they are sure that the moral thing to do is to forcibly transfer wealth from the rich people to the poor people. They think that the State ought to do such things—hence, they want the State to own the means of production, use them to create goods and services, and allocate them in a fair and just way to the people.

But wealth is not a fixed pie. Mankind was born into utter poverty, and now billions of people are wealthy enough to have the free time to read articles such as this one. So, yes, poverty is a tragedy. But with enough progress, we can all become as wealthy as today’s billionaires—indeed, most modern Westerners are wealthier than the kings of old, who died of diseases we’ve long since cured and who lacked basic comforts such as air conditioning.

The answer to poverty is not socialism, which only makes it more difficult to create more wealth. But trends indicate that young people in the West don’t know that—an Axios poll showed that 41 percent of American adults in 2021 held favorable views toward socialism.

Extreme environmentalism, or the so-called degrowth movement, aims to minimize humanity’s environmental impact by having fewer children, consuming less energy, and releasing less carbon into the atmosphere. As documented in a June 2024 New York Times article, anthropologist and prominent degrowth advocate Jason Hickel once wrote, “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”

The author of the New York Times piece, Jennifer Szalai, further writes, “The distinctive argument that Hickel and other degrowthers make is ultimately a moral one: ‘We have ceded our political agency to the lazy calculus of growth.’”

But there is nothing moral about slowing down growth for the planet’s sake or of rebalancing our relationship with nature. Growth is not some abstract thing that greedy capitalists have made a deity of. Growth means more wealth for people in the form of lifesaving and life-enhancing technologies, from shelter to protect us from the violent forces of the Earth to mass food production to bring starvation to an all-time low.

Some environmentalists are willing to sacrifice the well-being of humans for the sake of the Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants. But they fail to appreciate that it is only humans who stand a chance at saving the planet and every species in existence! After all, the sun will eventually engulf the Earth, and most species have gone extinct, never mind what humans have done. But only humans are capable of developing the technology to protect the Earth from the sun’s death and revive any species we so choose. This might sound like science fiction, but already we deflect asteroids from the Earth and create cells with synthetic genomes. The gap between those feats and the ones you think are science fiction is not insurmountable—but human civilization will need to grow to achieve them.

So, even by the environmentalists’ own standards, people are the primary moral agent in the world. Any side effect we cause can, in principle, be reversed in the long run. Incidentally, the primacy of people serves as a devastating criticism against those who advocate that we have fewer children—after all, more people means more creativity and more boundless potential to make progress.

And if something like climate change is judged by its effects on people, things have never been better thanks to growth. The Earth doesn’t care about us—but we care about each other. As philosopher Alex Epstein notes, “If you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.”

Yes, fossil fuels have changed the Earth. But they’ve also given us enough energy to create solutions to an uncountable number of problems, including developing safe, manmade environments that shield us from Mother Earth’s dangers. Degrowth would rob us of such creations and leave us cold, dark, and vulnerable. “On a human flourishing standard,” Epstein writes, “we want to avoid not ‘climate change’ but ‘climate danger’—and we want to increase ‘climate livability’ by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.”

You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth.

Scientism is the false idea that scientific knowledge trumps all other kinds of knowledge—that science alone can answer all our questions. But moral, economic, political, and philosophical problems can’t be answered by science alone. This is why the phrase “follow the science,” as we heard so often during the 2020 pandemic, doesn’t make sense. Scientific knowledge can inform our choices, but it alone cannot tell us what to do next, either in our personal lives or in politics more widely. For instance, science might offer us an explanation for how and why COVID-19 spreads, the conditions under which masks reduce spread, and the effect of age and body fat percentage on the risk of infection. But science cannot tell us whether the trade-offs associated with government-mandated lockdowns are worth it, whether the government should invest public funds into drug companies for the development of a vaccine, whether all questions pertaining to a pandemic should be left to the most local level of government or to the most global level of government, whether a grandparent ought to risk infection to visit his grandchildren, or whether a businessman should run an underground (and illegal) speakeasy during lockdowns so that he can afford rent. The answers to such questions require more than just scientific knowledge—they require political, economic, and moral knowledge. Knowledge about what one ought to want in life, knowledge about the trade-offs involved in our decisions, knowledge about the intended and unintended consequences of governmental policy, knowledge about legal precedent, and knowledge about what our political institutions are capable of doing. None of this could possibly be found in a science textbook. Those who claim otherwise are guilty of the sins of scientism.

As the Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek, inventor of the term “scientism,” wrote, “It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences—an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the ‘scientistic’ attitude—an attitude which . . . is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”

But if we cannot acquire moral, economic, or political knowledge via the methods that work so well in physics, how do we get such knowledge? The same way we always do: by conjecture and criticism. We guess what the right policy is, how we ought to act in the world, and how the economy works. And we criticize all those guesses—maybe not with the rigorous experiments we conduct in the physics laboratory, but experimentation is just one way of criticizing ideas.

Ironically, with the staggering advances made in the hard sciences over the past century, scientism has been on the rise. Quite simply, people think that they can take science’s successes and carry them over into every other field of human endeavor. In political and cultural battles, it is often thought that he who knows the most science must be in the right. If only we put the most scientifically minded people in charge of the world, it is thought, then they could solve all our problems from on high. But science alone cannot tell us whether children have a right to take hormone blockers, whether circumcision should be legal, or how long patents should last. That is no reason to despair—with or without the microscope, we can continue to make progress with creative guessing and criticizing.

Relativism comes in many forms, but perhaps the most dangerous is moral relativism—the idea that there is no difference between right and wrong or good and evil. “Who’s to say who is in the wrong?” the relativist ponders high-mindedly. “What Hamas did to Israel on October 7th is barbaric, but we must end this cycle of violence,” a relativist would say, implicating both sides. “Russia may have invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine is conscripting its own citizens. Therefore, both sides have committed wrongdoing.” “If Hitler was a villain for his genocide, then so was Churchill.”

Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right and the other in the wrong. It is not open to the idea that one society is open and dynamic and the other closed and static. It is not open to the notion that one country cherishes life while the other worships death. Nor is relativism fair—the relativist does static societies no favors by denying that they could become as prosperous as dynamic ones should they choose to do so. In their own way, relativists trap evil under the weight of their own suppressive culture when they could have cleansed it with the light of better ideas. And the relativist distorts the self-confidence of dynamic, progressive societies by muddying their understanding of why they’re so successful in the first place, mitigating their ability to make even further progress and spread the right ideas to static societies. The relativist is no highfalutin hero—he keeps evil on life support long past its expiration date.

Perhaps relativism is thriving in the West right now because people can afford to make such an egregious error. But not forever. For the enemies of the West are the enemies of civilization more broadly. They will not stop their anti-human ambitions, no matter how much relativists deny that that is what they are. Nor will it be relativists who ultimately stand up to them but rather those who distinguish between right and wrong, stasis and progress, victory and defeat.

Dogmatism refers to an idea that is considered, implicitly or explicitly, uncriticizable. The final truth. Known with certainty. Never to be changed. People tend to associate religious doctrines with dogmatism, but the connection is not a necessary one. After all, some religions have evolved to cohabitate with the rapid progress we’ve undergone since the Enlightenment (to be sure, other religions, tragically, have not yet done so—and whenever someone admits to “taking something on faith,” dogmatism is surely at work). But dogma is not confined to the cathedral. For instance, many political ideologies are thought to have perfect foundations by their adherents. And even in science, our best theories could, in principle, spread by dogmatic means. Karl Popper described Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as dogmatic. As philosopher Bryan Magee described psychoanalysts, “We should not . . . systematically evade refutation by continually reformulating either our theory or our evidence in order to keep the two in accord. . . . Thus they are substituting dogmatism for science while claiming to be scientific.” Even in the hard sciences, we could imagine a world in which people are not persuaded that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is true but rather are pressured to accept it as an uncriticizable foundation of our scientific worldview.

Because all our ideas contain errors, dogmatism always prevents us from improving on the ideas locked in dogma’s cage. Couple that with the fact that any error, no matter how small, could result in the eventual extinction of the human race, and we have good reason to rid our society of all dogmatic elements.

Doomerism is the idea that humanity has no shot at continuing to make progress, or that our extinction is just around the corner, or that we are uniquely vulnerable to being wiped out today, or that we are just one innovation away from guaranteeing our decline.

This attitude neutralizes the human spirit—after all, if humanity is sunk, why bother trying in the first place?

One of the primary examples of doomerism today is the debate over artificial intelligence. Some think that if we just keep innovating, we will eventually create an entity that is more intelligent and/or powerful than people could ever be and that we will fall to the status of slaves or animals beneath its feet. First, if the machine is not creative, it will be precisely as obedient as our microwaves are. And any unintentional side effects of AI can be accounted for with safety measures, as are currently being developed for self-driving cars. Second, if we do end up creating a machine that is as alive as we are—a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI—it is no more rational to assume that it will pursue our destruction as it is to assume that new humans will do so. New humans—namely children—are raised to adopt the values of the culture around them. Of course, sometimes they rebel, especially when adults force them to do things they don’t want to do. Therefore, the problem of how to integrate an AGI into our society is the same as the problem of how to raise children into happy, productive adults—and we’ve been improving at that for centuries.

Another dangerous effect of doomerism is tyranny, whether through cultural taboos, governmental regulations, or outright bans. They all amount to slowing the growth of knowledge and wealth, and of progress more generally. For if the next innovative step marks our doom, then surely a little—or a lot—of tyranny is justified! But innovation is the very panacea that doomers are worried about. It is stasis, not change, that will mark our end.

Moreover, we might choose to slow ourselves down, but the bad guys won’t. So there’s no world in which AI doesn’t continue to progress. But there is a world in which the bad guys get a hold of novel technologies before we do—and, with it, the end of our sustained Enlightenment.

So socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism have all earned their bona fides as enemies of civilization. In one way or another, they curb our ability to make progress, a stain on the project that is humanity. But is each stain a unique color, or do they come from the same poisonous ink jar?

Indeed, all memetic enemies of civilization have one thing in common: They slow the growth of knowledge.

This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.

Blog Post | Natural Disasters

Degrowth Means Certain Death for Humanity

Just because the Earth is habitable today does not mean that it will be habitable tomorrow.

Summary: falsely thinking of Earth as reliably habitable, proponents of degrowth ignore the numerous natural threats that could end human civilization. The planet faces potential dangers ranging from asteroid impacts, to supernova explosions, to gamma-ray bursts. Addressing these threats requires advancing technology and wealth, as emphasized by Elon Musk’s vision of interplanetary colonization to improve humanity’s chances of long-term survival.


According to scientists, the Earth has experienced five mass extinction events, which means that well over 99 percent of species that have ever lived have gone the way of the dodo. Keep that in mind the next time you hear proponents of degrowth advocate in favor of a poorer and, therefore, technologically less-sophisticated future of humanity. So marinated are we in the cult of Mother Gaia that we have forgotten the many ways in which our planet could, completely unaided, put an end to human consciousness. Here are some key scenarios:

  • Weakening or reversal of the magnetosphere: Earth’s magnetic field protects us from harmful solar and cosmic radiation. A significant weakening or a complete reversal of the magnetic field could lead to increased radiation reaching the surface, which could cause widespread damage to living organisms and potentially lead to mass extinctions.
  • Supervolcano eruptions: Supervolcanoes, such as the one beneath Yellowstone National Park, could erupt with such force that they would release vast amounts of ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. That could block sunlight, leading to a “volcanic winter” with drastic cooling and disruption of global climate patterns, resulting in widespread crop failures and mass starvation.
  • Plate tectonics and continental drift: Significant shifts in tectonic plates could cause massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Over long periods, these shifts could also alter ocean currents and climate patterns, potentially making the planet inhospitable for many forms of life.
  • Ice ages: Natural cycles in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt, known as Milankovitch cycles, could trigger ice ages. A severe ice age could cover large parts of the planet in ice, drastically reducing habitable areas and potentially leading to mass extinctions.
  • Ocean current disruption: The global ocean conveyor belt, which circulates warm and cold water around the planet, is crucial for regulating climate. Natural changes that disrupt these currents could lead to extreme and rapid climate changes, potentially making the environment hostile to current forms of life.
  • Methane hydrate release: Natural warming could trigger the release of methane stored in ocean sediments and permafrost. This potent greenhouse gas could lead to runaway global warming, significantly altering the climate and potentially leading to mass extinctions.

These scenarios, while varying in likelihood and timescales, highlight the range of natural processes that could severely impact life on Earth. There are also several ways in which cosmic events and processes in space could potentially lead to the extinction of all life on Earth. Here are the primary threats:

  • Asteroid and comet impacts: Large asteroid or comet impacts could cause massive destruction. The impact could create shock waves, earthquakes, and tsunamis and throw up so much debris into the atmosphere that it blocks sunlight, leading to a significant drop in temperatures and a phenomenon known as an “impact winter.”
  • Supernova explosions: A supernova within 30 light-years of Earth could be catastrophic. The explosion would emit high levels of radiation, including gamma rays, which could strip away the ozone layer, exposing life on Earth to harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
  • Nearby hypernova: Besides a supernova, a hypernova, which is an even more powerful explosion, could also pose a threat. A nearby hypernova could similarly strip away the ozone layer and bombard Earth with high levels of radiation.
  • Gamma-ray bursts: Gamma-ray bursts are intense bursts of gamma rays from distant galaxies. If one were to occur within our galaxy and be pointed directly at Earth, the radiation could deplete the ozone layer and cause severe damage to the atmosphere, leading to mass extinction.
  • Solar flares and coronal mass ejections: The sun occasionally emits large bursts of solar energy. While Earth’s magnetic field provides some protection, a particularly strong flare or coronal mass ejection could overwhelm this protection, causing widespread electrical disruptions and potentially damaging the atmosphere.
  • Rogue planets or stars: A rogue planet or star passing close to the solar system could gravitationally disrupt the orbits of planets, potentially sending Earth into a destabilized orbit, either closer to or further from the sun, leading to extreme climate changes.
  • Black holes: A wandering black hole passing through the solar system could have devastating gravitational effects. It could disturb the orbits of planets, potentially ejecting Earth from the solar system or drawing it in.
  • Solar evolution: The sun will eventually evolve into a red giant, expanding and possibly engulfing Earth. Long before this, increasing solar radiation could boil away the oceans and strip away the atmosphere, making Earth uninhabitable.
  • Milky Way collisions: The Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy. While this event is billions of years away, such a collision could disrupt the solar system and potentially lead to the end of life on Earth due to gravitational disturbances and increased radiation.

In his “New Rule: No Planet B” segment on Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher critiqued Elon Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars. Maher argued that no matter how bad things get on Earth, they cannot be worse than the harsh conditions on Mars, which lacks breathable air, has extreme temperatures, and experiences long dust storms. He emphasized that we should focus on solving our planet’s problems rather than escaping to another inhospitable one.

That’s lazy thinking. Just because the Earth is habitable today does not mean that it will be habitable tomorrow. And no matter how careless we supposedly are in our interaction with the environment, the negative consequences of human activity pale in comparison with the dangers posed by natural planetary and cosmic events and processes. Musk is right: In the long run, the only way to ensure the future of our (hopefully interplanetary) species is through exponential increase in wealth and technological sophistication.

New York Times | Economic Growth

US Productivity Surges 2.3 Percent, Beating Forecasts

“Productivity grew at a 2.3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday, surpassing economists’ expectations. The pickup was a major improvement upon the sluggish 0.4 percent rate in the first quarter. And on a yearly basis, productivity increased 2.7 percent. That far exceeds prepandemic averages.”

From New York Times.

Blog Post | Wealth & Poverty

How Nations Escape Poverty | Podcast Highlights

Chelsea Follett interviews Rainer Zitelmann about the ideas, attitudes, and policies that allowed Poland and Vietnam to escape poverty.

Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.

Get Rainer Zitelmann’s new book, How Nations Escape Poverty, here.

Tell me about your book, How Nations Escape Poverty, and what inspired you to write it.

During my research, I found a connection between attitudes towards rich people and poverty. Countries that are very successful economically have, in most cases, a much more positive attitude toward wealth and rich people than other countries. I’ll give you one example: China. China calls itself a communist country, but in 1981, it started free-market reforms and introduced private property. It was a huge success. The number of people living in extreme poverty in China decreased from 88 percent in 1981 to less than 1 percent today. And it started with Deng Xiaoping’s slogan, “let some people become rich first.”

Then another thing: I studied the Index of Economic Freedom from the Heritage Foundation. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s what I call the capitalism ranking. At the top, you find countries like Singapore and Switzerland, and at the bottom, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba. In my opinion, what’s most important is not a country’s absolute position in the ranking but how that position has changed over time. And if you analyze the years between 1995, when the index began, to today, you see that Poland and Vietnam have gained an enormous amount of economic freedom.

Adam Smith was right that the best recipe against poverty is economic growth, not redistribution or government regulation. He also understood that the most important precondition for economic growth is economic freedom. Poland and Vietnam are two examples of this. These countries were once very poor. Vietnam was the poorest country in the world in 1990. Poland was one of the poorest countries in Europe. And now it’s amazing. Poland has been Europe’s economic growth champion for the past three decades, and Vietnam has also become very prosperous.

Many people do not agree with Adam Smith’s view. How do you respond to them?

Imagine a test tube with two ingredients: market and state. Poland and Vietnam are examples of what happens if you add more market, but you can also see what happens if you add more state. One example is Argentina.

Argentina, 100 years ago, was one of the richest countries in the world. Then, they started with these crazy Peronist policies, more state redistribution, and so on. Today, 40 percent of Argentinians live in poverty. It’s a terrible story.

Another example is Venezuela, which was, in the 1970s, one of the richest countries in the world. Then, they started with more regulation, labor market regulation, and so on, and the situation became worse. But Venezuelans drew the wrong conclusion. They voted for a socialist, Hugo Chavez, in 1998. It was not so bad in the first few years because oil prices were high. But then they started with all the crazy things that socialists do, and the result was a one million percent inflation rate. Today, 25 percent of Venezuela’s population has fled the country. Those who stayed now live in poverty.

So, what does help fight poverty?

Many people think redistribution is the way to fight poverty and that rich countries—the United States and Europe—should give a lot of money to poor countries. But they’ve tried this for over 50 years, and it hasn’t worked. You can see this if you compare Africa and Asia. Africa is still very poor today, while in Asia, we saw a lot of progress, even though Asia received far less development aid than Africa. The reason for the economic growth in Asian countries was not development aid but capitalism.

And another thing is important: Today, many people claim they are poor because of colonialism, the West, slavery, and so on. But people in Vietnam are much more pragmatic. They could blame others—they were at war, not only with the United States, but also with Japan, France, and China— but they don’t. On the contrary, people in Vietnam love the United States, you see it in the polls. They don’t look to the past. They don’t blame other countries or other people. Instead, they look within themselves.

If you have a victim mentality and you always blame other people for your problems, you will never be successful. But if you take responsibility, not only for your successes but also for your failures, then you will be successful. It’s the same with countries. Vietnam is a very good example of this attitude.

Tell me more about Vietnam.

A lot of people don’t know much about Vietnam. Sometimes, I ask people, how many people live in Vietnam? They tell me, “20 million, 30 million.” No, it’s almost 100 million. It’s one of the biggest countries in the world.

Of course, a lot of people know about the war, but not everyone knows how terrible it was. Vietnam had ten times more bombs and explosives dropped on it by the United States than Germany did in the Second World War. Almost everything was destroyed, and what was not destroyed by the war was later destroyed by the planned economy. At the end of the 1980s, 80 percent of the people in Vietnam lived in poverty. Today, it’s 5 percent.

The reason for this positive development is that the people in Vietnam are smart. They tried a planned economy, but it created a lot of problems. They had a 600 percent inflation rate; there was widespread poverty, and people were going hungry. They tried to reform the socialist system, but that failed. Then, in 1986, the Communist Party decided on more economic freedom. They didn’t abolish the planned economy overnight, but, step by step, they introduced private property, opened the economy to the world, and ripped out a lot of crazy regulations. And then, step by step, standards of living increased. Over the years and now over the decades, everything changed in Vietnam.

Another important thing was that they changed how they think about inequality and rich people. Vietnam calls herself a socialist country and has a leading communist party, but I can guarantee you it’s harder to find a Marxist in Vietnam than at Harvard University. For example, I was invited to Vietnam’s prestigious Foreign Trade University for a workshop, “How can we improve the image of wealthy people?” I’ve never been invited to a similar workshop in the United States or Europe.

For this book, I commissioned two polls in Vietnam, one about the image of capitalism and the other about the image of rich people. We did this research in 13 countries, and the Vietnamese had the most positive attitude towards wealth and rich people. In most countries, even the word capitalism has a negative connotation, but in Vietnam, capitalism has a positive connotation. We asked people in Vietnam, “What economic system do you admire?” At the bottom of the list were China and North Korea. At the top of the list were countries like Japan and South Korea, and for young people, even the United States.

However, in terms of political freedom, it’s not great in Vietnam. Economically, there were a lot of good changes, but politically, it more or less remained the same. It’s a one-party system, there’s no freedom of press. It’s not as repressed as China, but you can’t compare it with Europe or the United States.

Now tell me about Poland.

In the 1980s, under socialism, Poland was a very poor country. Very few people had a telephone, car, or washing machine. Poland was even poorer than Ukraine at the time. Their GDP per capita was only half of the Czech Republic’s. They also had a very high inflation rate and a lot of debts to foreign capitalist countries. And one important difference between Vietnam and Poland is that Poland had a political revolution.

After socialism was abolished at the end of the 1980s, Poland had good luck because there was a reformer named Balcerowicz. He’s the Ronald Reagan or the Maggie Thatcher of Poland. Balcerowicz’s economic reforms were called “Shock Therapy.” From one day to the other, he introduced private property, tax reforms, and deregulation. In short, he abolished socialism and implemented a capitalist system. And what happened?

This is the problem. After these economic reforms, in the first two or three years, things became worse. For example, hidden unemployment became official unemployment. In socialist countries, there was officially zero unemployment, but people did crazy, senseless jobs, so it was hidden unemployment. After shock therapy, this hidden unemployment becomes official unemployment. There was also a reduction in the GDP and many other problems. You can imagine that the people from the other parties and the press who didn’t agree with his reforms were very critical. This was a very difficult time for Balcerowicz. In Vietnam, it was easier because there were no other parties who could criticize the reforms. There was no freedom of the press, so no newspapers could criticize it. But in Poland, Balcerowicz had to handle this criticism. Thankfully, he succeeded, and in the following decades, things became so much better.

I quote a book very often in my book; the title is Europe’s Growth Champion. And this is true: Poland has been Europe’s growth champion for three decades. But the problem is that sometimes people forget why their country became successful and call for more government. This happened in the United States and Europe. And this, unfortunately, happened in Poland. People voted for the Law and Justice Party, and they governed from 2015 to December 2023. They stopped privatization and even started to nationalize some things. They started redistribution programs. The good news is that in the last elections, they voted for the opposition. We will see what happens now. I hope they go back to the path that made Poland so successful.

Do you have anything else to say about Poland before we move on to your concluding thoughts?

Yes, I want to add something. I commissioned the biggest poll ever done about the image of the market economy and capitalism with one of the leading polling institutes in the world, Ipsos MORI.

People in Poland had the highest opinion of the market economy and capitalism. The United States was number two, but there was a huge difference between old and young people. I commissioned another poll about the image of rich people to compare how envious people are in different countries. The most envious people are in France, followed by Germany. People in Poland and Vietnam are on the other side of the distribution. They are not envious of the rich. For them, rich people are role models rather than scapegoats.

I think this is a very important result. In the United States, some years ago, protestors positioned a guillotine in the front of the mansion of Jeff Bezos to show what they would like to do with him. Now imagine two different people. One person joins a group to build this guillotine, and the other orders a biography of Jeff Bezos to learn how he became so wealthy. Who do you expect will be more successful in five years? If you want to change your life, you have to start by changing your mindset. But it’s not only true for an individual. It’s also true for a country. This is why what think tanks do is so important. The change, for example, with Reagan, started with people like Milton Friedman. The change in the UK with Maggie Thatcher started with the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs. Milei’s election in Argentina was thanks to the work that think tanks in Argentina had been doing for years.

This is also how the anti-capitalists and leftists became successful. They understand the importance of marketing and public relations. I think we can learn something from them. They are able to sell their crazy ideas in spite of the fact that more than 100 million people died as a result of socialist experiments. We should be able to explain to people that capitalism is the route out of poverty. This is the message of my book.