Meet the lefty Europeans who want to shrink the economy

In 1972 aGDP MEP collective of grandees known as the Club of Rome set out to establish the limits to economic growth. Worried about the state of the planet, they fed a computer all they knew about farming yields, natural resources, population trends and so on. The rudimentary machine crunched the data and spouted a grim answer: given ecological constraints, the highest standard of living possible was one stagnating at half the American level of the time. Anything beyond that risked imminent disaster, a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity”.Half a century later, the global population has doubled and more than quadrupled: the limits to growth turned out to be as surmountable in the 20th century as they had been when first posited in the 18th. But anyone thinking that another 50 years of evidence might have settled the debate has not met the European left. At a three-day “Beyond Growth” conference held at the European Parliament in Brussels this week (and organised by 20 mainly left-leaning s), an audience of youngsters whooped and cheered as speakers proclaimed that, this time, the limits of growth really been reached. Driven by ecological concerns and riled by social injustice, to them the question is no longer how to mitigate the effects of human activity, for example by investing in green technologies. Rather, some form of “de-growth”—, in the original French—is necessary today to avoid societal collapse.