Should economists be scared of degrowth?

A pyromaniac in a fire-station. That’s how I felt writing a PhD on degrowth in an economics department. I still remember the bewildered face of the department director during our first meeting. To a development economist trained in neoclassical theory, the idea of downscaling production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints¹ sounds as outrageous as it gets.  

A decade later, not much has changed. Last October, my arrival at HEC Lausanne caused a small controversy² in the Swiss media. Depicted as an ideologically driven activist on a cover mission to radicalise academia, I almost felt like a Bond villain. But this has nothing to do with HEC or even with me. This is the topic. Economics departments are as interested in welcoming growth-critical researchers as property owners are to let beg bugs in. 

This is strange because the concept actually comes from economics. One of the foundational texts in degrowth studies is The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s, a Romanian mathematician with a solid reputation in the field of economics. Herman Daly, who was once Senior economist at the World Bank, was one of the first to properly theorise the idea of a “steady-state economy,” which is now a cornerstone of ecological economics.  

So why are most economists scared of the D-word? From experience, it is mostly ignorance. The debates I have with fellow economists are often underwhelming³. Even Philippe Aghion, a specialist in growth theory, had no idea there was an actual academic literature on the topic⁴. Economists wrongly assume there is nothing more to degrowth than an ideology. But why would studying the degrowth of an economy be more political than studying its growth? 

This timidity is particularly problematic in a field that lacks environmental skills. Oswald and Stern (2019) counted the number of articles on climate change in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Of the 4,700 articles published since it was founded in 1800, there is zero on the topic. In a more recent study, El Tinay and Schor (2025) analysed all the papers in the five most popular economics journals between 1975 and 2023 to find that only 25 articles out of 18,282 dealt with climate change. The situation is even more critical for other lesser-known ecological issues. Of the 47,000 articles published since 2000 in the 50 journals ranked highest by the Financial Times, only 11 focus on biodiversity. 

The same blind spot applies to the way economics is taught. Charmetant et al (2024) reviewed 57 economics textbooks for undergraduate students. On average, they found 2.68 pages on climate change per book, that’s 0.55% of the content. According to a study of the 53 French public universities offering a bachelor’s degree in economics, only 0.8% of ECTS are devoted to environmental issues. Half the universities offer no content on the subject. 

Economists don’t research it, they don’t teach it, and they actively disparage it – a conceptual bullying of some sort. Growth-critical scholars are systematically attacked, often with false accusations of inappropriate activism, ideological bias, or lack of pretty publications (in journals that, in reality, actively embargo the topic). In times of environmental dangers, this discrimination is counter-productive, especially since ecological economists are specifically trained to deal with these very issues. Picking a regular macroeconomist to solve an environmental problem is like asking your dentist to fix your car. 

History unfortunately repeats itself. I was a bachelor student during the 2008 financial crisis. I still remember the letter written by the fellows of the British Academy after the Queen’s visit to the London School of Economics where she asked “why did nobody notice it?” “A failure of collective imagination,” they wrote as an answer. That’s exactly what it was and that’s exactly what it still is. Today’s field of economics is narrow-minded in terms of topic, dismissive of interdisciplinarity, and devoid of theoretical and methodological pluralism. “Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools,” wrote the anthropologist David Graeber. Yes, except the tools are not actually in the shed but in the hands of policymakers. The world needs surgeons, not butchers; and economists need scalpels, not cleavers. In these time of great uncertainty, we should value academic creativity, not repress it.

1. For a definition of the term, see “Defining degrowth” (Parrique, 2025). ↩︎
2. To read more about the controversy: 1, 2, 3. ↩︎
3. Christian Gollier (see also here), Emmanuel Lechypre, Alessio Terzi (see also here), Paul Krugman, Matt Huber (see also here), Serge Allegrezza, Leigh Phillips, David Cayla, Jean-Marie Harribey, Yanis Varoufakis, Jacques Attali, or Branko Milanović.
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4.  See, for example, two synthetic literature reviews (Kallis et al. 2018 and Kallis et al., 2025) and more specific inventories of macroeconomic modelling studies (Lauer et al., 2025; Hardt and O’Neill, 2017). As for my personal overview of the field, see The political economy of growth (2019) and Slow down or die. The economics of degrowth (2025), the English translation of Ralentir ou périr. L’économie de la décroissance (2022). ↩︎