 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast. I'm your host, Aristeed, from Metabolism of Cities. In this podcast, we interview thinkers, researchers, activists, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. On today's episode, I want to go back to a topic we briefly covered previously on a previous episode and get a bit more technical or encyclopedical. This concept is getting more and more traction, although it is still very badly understood or used by people. I'm talking about the concept of degross. To clarify some misconceptions about this topic, I've invited Timothée Barrick, a researcher that holds a PhD from the Université Clairement Auvern and the Stockholm Resilience Center, entitled The Political Economy of Degross. Timothée is very active online where he collects and digests most of the work on degross, but he also responds to media articles that cover degross both positively and negatively. With all that being said, Timothée, thanks for being part of this podcast, and perhaps can you give a brief introduction of yourself and your work? Hello, Aris Thieton. Thanks for having me. I do collect and digest a lot of material from the internet. That makes me sound a bit like the garbage collector of degrowth literature, but yes, during my PhD, I've tried to synthesize and organize the ideas that had been associated with degrowth. You could say I've tried to build a theory of degrowth. My favorite part of that was to get into the criticism, what I've called the controversies, the point that weren't clear, and use these hot questions to work with the concept in the same way that you would warm up a sword in fire and then hammer it so you can shape it into something new. I think a concept is the same. It is in the heat of the controversy that a concept can take new shapes. So since the thesis has been finished, I've been focusing on this among a few other research questions, but I could not expect that degrowth would become so cool because when I started in 2016, it wasn't. So you would talk about degrowth and people would be like, de-what? Even my own computer still refuses to accept degrowth, my word software, as an actual word. It still keeps ricking. What is it proposed? Yeah, regrowth. More growth. It seems to be the cool concept for my computer. But now with the pandemic, degrowth has become a widely popular topic. And now during the French presidential election, and I'm sure we'll come back to this, one of the candidates has been promoting degrowth. And so my phone has been ringing every day from journalists being like, hi, just heard about this degrowth thing. What is it? Could you just summarize in like 30 seconds your 800 pages thesis, please? So I got this one every day. I'm getting better at it. So what's the latest 30 seconds you've given to a media? Actually, it's widely different answers, depending on who's calling. When an economist is calling, I add like an economist journalist from TV wanting to, you know, that they're going to film the three minute little explanatory videos about degrowth. And then they were just like, okay, how do I explain this to an economist? It's not the same way you would explain it to a sustainability scientist or to just a mainstream politician or something like this. But that's what I like about the concept. There are many different entrants. It's a bit like a house. Well, the concept is always like a house. When you do theory building, it's exactly like building a house. And when you have a house, you can enter by one door, by one window, you can do things. You can store things in that. And degrowth is a bit like that. It's a house with many entrants that contains many furnitures and many different things. And it's a house that has been, you know, on construction and redesigned. And so there's a lot to be used to discuss. A lot of discussion can be hosted in that house. And the way you decide to define it in the first place can either stimulate an interesting and new discussion, or just shut it down. So when journalists come to you and ask like, okay, so I had this one a few days ago. Okay, so I think you're, you and your friends, tell me if I'm wrong. You're friends. Yeah, you're advocating for a permanent recession in the world. I'm all right. So you do that. So, so why? This is the, the worst question I ever received. You're like, okay, well, there's so much unpacking to do. But where do I start now? So so it's like, Tim, you hate people. Why explain us in 30 seconds? You're a heartless monster. Yeah, in 30 seconds, though, or less. So you said that, you know, a sword gets forged in, you know, in these tough times and then under heated questions. What are the some of the most heated questions that you often get when you talk about degross or that you want to counter using the degross argument? One of the recurring controversy is about the name. And is it an appealing? Is that the right communication strategy? Is that something that perhaps will be a non-starter for politicians that need to appeal to voters? And that's not a superficial question about, you know, the the semantic is not something very scholarly. It's an important question because the question behind this is not only about degrowth is about, how do we build momentum for creating change in society? So here we see we have a very broad sociological question. And degrowth is in that sense, not that different from Green New Deal and ecological transition, sustainable development back in the 80s and 90s and many other transition concepts. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that degrowth is called degrowth or you could call it whatever you want. The underlying question is, you know, how do we kickstart an important transformation, something that's not going to kickstart itself and something that we need to kickstart fast? So that's the real question here. So very often the debate remains within like, I don't like how it sounds. It sounds negative. You know, and you're like, okay, great, but you know, we're not discussing how to, we're not creating a shampoo brand. You know, we're not going to have this like, we want to appeal to consumer, maybe we want to buy this stuff. This is not what it's about. It's about having a name that is provocative enough to kickstart the discussion and then to hold that discussion to the point where it can move to something else. I think, you know, degrowth is a bit of a bridge concept. Of course, you know, I do hope that in 10, 20 years we will have stopped discussing degrowth because if we still do, it means we're still living in a society obsessed by economic growth and judging by, you know, what the IPCC is telling us, that is still the case in 20 years, well, then our job is going to get increasingly difficult. So that's one controversy I like about the name. I'm sure you've heard of it before. And well, what's interesting with this is that, well, what you said that a lot of times it's negative and people are scared about this and all of that. But we also seen how sustainable development didn't work, how many other non-controversial concepts didn't work throughout the years, right? And degrowth out of the gate says growth is more or less the enemy quote unquote. This is what, where our efforts should, this is where we should put our efforts. And in that sense, it's not meant to be appealing. It points with the finger that's our common enemy, let's say, or so at least you cannot brain a greenwash that much degrowth compared to other concepts, or can you? No, I don't think you can't. And that's one of its strengths. I'll often find that if we're standing behind a concept like the common good, economy for the common good, the well-being economy, the concept of the good life, you know, sustainable economy, a green economy, a circular economy, I kind of think of a single person today that's going to be against a well-being economy. Everyone is for something. It means you've not pointed, you know, the diverse interests. Your concept does not have any transformative power. And today, if we start admitting that the system we have today isn't sustainable and we can spend more time developing what do we mean by that system. But if the status quo is not working, it means we need change that is transformative, radical, structural, you call it as you want, but a lot of change. And so if we're proposing something and everyone agrees, including the fossil fuel extractors and, you know, the capitalist renties and, you know, marketing firms, then you're like, okay, perhaps, you know, we've not touched really that part of the system that we want to change. So with degrowth, at least it works, you know, you just pointed and you divide the room straight away. You know, some people are going to think, yeah, they're going to love it. Other people are going to hate it. And that's the good start for discussion. Then we can agree on what we disagree. That's the first thing that is important now. And then later on, we can reconcile with other concepts that are more consensual post growth. We can come back to, you know, the wellbeing economy, which of course is an important concept in the very long term. And it's not either degrowth or the wellbeing economy. It's more like degrowth is that concept to trigger a discussion, to be critical about economic growth and enable us actually to just de-circulate certain institutions and do all the changes that will enable the building of the wellbeing economy. So that was one heated argument, let's say, the one of the name as well and how, you know, how to call it. Were there some others that you often get or something that you always respond to or want to clarify? Okay, I'm going to talk of one that is very technical and specific, but I think it's important. So very often you'll be like, okay, we want degrowth and we associate this maybe with working time reduction, some investment in public services, renewable energy infrastructure, supporting cooperatives, local agriculture. So a lot of changes and people will be like, well, how do you finance this? Where do you find the money? So that sounds like a very pragmatic question. And it's not new to degrowth. I mean, ever since there was green parties at every presidential election, you know, all the others always just looking smug and calling their economists like, nice, your little thing, you want to tax, you know, you want to just phase out fossil fuel and you want to do this and that, but how are you going to pay for it? So now in the context of degrowth, this question becomes interesting, because that forces us to rethink the core question of political economy, which is the question of value. Where is value coming from in society? Today, in let's say mainstream economics vision of capitalism, we tend to see value as anything that can be sold, you know, with a profit on the market. So we're, we're mixing like value with profitability in a sense. And so if you're perhaps saying like, well, we're going to have a local job guarantee that's going to help matching people with green jobs that have meaning for them, but they're not going to produce anything that has a financial value, because they're going to perhaps just, you know, restore ecosystems, work on, on burned forest, for example, and well, that's just, that's not going to generate any money. And so people will be like, well, that does not generate any value. I don't think that's true. I mean, it's just here we can see that there's just two different definitions of value. And today perhaps, and that's part of the degrowth canon, is to criticize the narrow mindedness about the definition of value in capitalism, where you have this, this, the market that is basically setting what should be considered valuable and what should not. So I give you an example of public services. So somehow when you ask people, how will you finance degrowth? One underlying assumption is that public services do not create value. They're like luxuries that we can afford because we can tax the value created in a market activity, you know, income taxation, value added taxation, taxing profits, all of this, the state portion, a tiny bit of that money, and then can use it to pay for doctors and, you know, build hospitals and invest in renewable energy. And somehow we need to grow the market economy so that we can finance this activity through state taxation. But then as an economist, you need to ask yourself, what's the difference in nature between, you know, a private, private production and public production, because it's precisely the same, you know, that each kind of mobilize some money in advance, pay some people to do some work, mobilize some natural resources, produce a service or a good, and then they sell it. Private production, you sell it on the market and customers pay straight. Public production, customers don't pay, they get more or less free access to the service, but then it's paid with taxation. Macro economically, there's no differences between these two. You could have an economy that is fully private, an economy that is fully public, it would just work precisely the same. So here we see we're confronting ourselves with a neoliberal belief as the state, as an inherently inefficient entity. And here I'm not only pointing at the state to kind of reconstruct everything should be public, but also because when we're talking of degrowth, we're talking of decentralizing economic activities, so having more and more activity at the commons level, at the level of the city, where we have local currencies, cooperatives, neighborhood, reciprocity networks, things like this. And if we start from the assumption that these are unproductive luxuries that we can afford by taxing Amazon and all the other companies, then, you know, we're not really dealing with the underlying problem, which is the question of value and what do we decide to value in production? Degrowth answer, we should value what satisfy needs more than, you know, what just find a buyer on the market. I think it's just in a society with very high levels of inequality, you cannot trust market demand anymore. So we need to fall back on something else. And I think falling back on needs is a pretty solid grounding to organize an economy because at the end of the day, that's what the economy is about. Issued satisfy needs. Of course, at the same time, though, you know, how do you say, how do you compare needs between different countries or how do you set a standard of needs? You know, I mean, our needs have vastly changed over the last 20, 30 or 100 years. And, well, probably we're still happier now than a century ago, but I mean, of how much, you know, can we quantify how much our needs are more met today than a century before and, you know, how much more resources will meet like 1% more of our needs? You know, there's a, I think politicians or economists like numbers and like to see the GDP change of X%. Like how would we say we've met 0.X of our needs this year? Or that would be a politician's goal of a de-growth politician would be to meet all of the needs of all of our citizens. How do we go about this numerically or can we? Yeah, I mean, there are many indicators that allow you to do this. I mean, let's remember the GDP was created in the 1930s. The first solid alternative to GDP was in 1972. And since then, there's been many, many alternatives. I'll give you an example of one way I quite like that I've been using in my thesis for France. So there's an economist that has calculated the way it calls the macroeconomic surplus. So what it does, it starts by calculating reference basket. So you take, you know, maybe like 10, 15 people in a city and you ask them, what do you need? What kind of goods and services do you need every day, every week, every month to be able to be happy, satisfy your needs, participate in society? So of course, you know, they'll tell you a house and cars and everything, you know, depending on whatever the definer's needs. Then once you have this quantity of stuff, you give them a price, you know, and then you aggregate to, okay, these people in this city said this, in another city they said that, but in that other city housing is more expensive. So perhaps the living wage is a bit higher. And then you aggregate with the entire population. That gives you a bit of a minima of like, to satisfy everyone's needs in France, you need that amount of money. And then you can compare this to national income, okay, which is just, you know, one way of calculating GDP. And if you do this in France, interestingly, in 1950, that was the moment where they were both equal. National income was just right, what you need to satisfy everyone's needs. So if you decrease your national income, it means that some people will not be able to satisfy their needs. But now today, there's just a 42% surplus. So if you were to cut France income by 42% and granted that income was equitably distributed, it means that everyone could still satisfy their needs. So that's one way, if you still want to play with monetary indicators, you can do this. But then we're leaving out a lot of different, let's say no monetary ways of satisfying needs. Because at the end of the day, you know, there's not some needs you don't satisfy with commodities, the need for affection and community and trust and all of this. So in part of all the new waves of alternative to GDP indicators, we have the data and we have the indicator to do this. I mean, look at the one in New Zealand, the well-being budget that they've been starting to use in 2019. 65 indicators, social, ecological, economic, with data on education, leisure time, trust, political participation, inequality, disposable income, and of course many others on measure of ecological sustainability. So if you still want, we will still be able to measure the performance of public policy. And even at the level of the city, if we assume that decision-making will be decentralized for a municipality or for a neighbourhood common, you can still measure these things. And actually that's what we do today. The only difference is today we assume we still measure this. We measure life expectancy and health levels and education levels. All of this is better and better measured. But the shortcut we do association is to assume that more GDP per capita is somehow correlated to more of these. Empirically, we know it's not true. Now we just need to do the extra staff and be like, well, let's just not care about GDP per capita. Let's just focus on the well-being with these indicators. And let's name this the objective of the economy. I've always been, my, you know, my utopian economy will be one where, you know, the main goal of the economy every year is to reach like a 2% decrease in working time. You know, every year, you know, they would publish the government will be, today we've reduced working time by, you know, this amount of hours. That is the equivalent of, you know, you can increase your nap time by two and a half, you know, per day. And then the people will be, yes, yes, more naps for people. I'll see you in a bit. I have to nap now. I get it. Now that you hear it, I'm making a point about an economy, it's meant to economize. Like it's a collective organization to satisfy needs. And so we should measure its performance with its ability to economize the use of resources. So starting with time, of course, the less we have to work, the more we can just not work and do whatever we want, which is great. And then the same thing, the less natural resources we use, well, then the less we have, we take the risk of degrading ecosystems, the more we, you know, preserve natural resources for later. So of course, then there are other goals I've been to do with the quality of the process of production and conviviality and that but deeply if your economy requires year after year, more resources to function, it means it's just losing in performance. Except of course, if you're starting from a point where, you know, you don't have enough production to satisfy all your needs, then it's normal. Then that production increased to match it. But in our case, when it's like this, using more resources makes no sense whatsoever. So I guess that that's another heated argument, which always come to see in is that, oh, yeah, degrowth, but what about countries that still have to meet their needs and all of that. And it's always the same. It's like, but degrowth cannot happen everywhere. But there is, I guess, people just read the headlines and don't see the entire picture of the entire text. And I guess no degrowth scholar ever says that a country that hasn't met its needs should not meet its needs. And we should just, you know, instead of having two cars, we should just have one car. How do you how do you find the patience to respond to these type of comments? Okay, so to realize how absurd that situation is, imagine I'm a doctor. I go online and I explain, you know, I've been working on obesity for quite some years. And I'm explaining, I've realized that somehow if you're in a situation, if you're overweight, situation of obesity, reducing your intake of sugar and fats and different food can be a good way of losing weight. And then you have everyone attacking you being like, Oh, right. So you want to shrink the body weight of just, you know, thin children, you want everyone to lose weight, you want babies to lose weight, you're just mental. That's the same thing here. It's absolutely the same degrowth since day one. So prehistory in the 1970s, and the concept itself since the beginning of the 2000 was always very specific to, we need to reduce production and consumption in high income, high consuming countries. And we need to do so precisely because natural resources and ecosystem function are limited. And so if we want other countries in the world that have not reached that level of production to be able to increase it, we need to make sure that they have time, energy and material. If we expropriate all of their natural resources, and we keep them locked in producing, you know, all the stuff that we consume in the north, then there's going to be a bit of a problem. So the solution from the degrowth perspective is, you know, this macroeconomic diet in ecologically fat countries as to enable the, let's say, availability of resources for a healthy diet in other countries. And here when I'm saying this, it's not meant to mean like, oh, the global south can just follow the path of development of the north. Doesn't mean that. When I say to develop, it's, you know, they can define prosperity the way they want. But one thing we know, whatever the way you define prosperity, if you have economic agitation, if you produce more things, you need more energy, material and time. So regardless of what you're doing, why you're doing it, how long you're doing it, you will need these energy, time and resources. And so far, they don't have them because high income countries are eating it all. And it's funny how I mean, there are very heated arguments on at least on Twitter and every, I see every week, another person saying about their own opinion on degrowth or how they think it's suicide or how they think it's so before it was just hippies, right? Degrowth were just a bunch of hippies that wanted to live in communal spaces and share many things. And now it gets like, no, no, degrowth people are are intrinsically bad or they want to see other people suffer. And I don't know, it's because it's gaining momentum. So they really feel that they have to react to something new. Or have they, what is their beef as well with with degrowth? Why this sudden despise or this sudden, let's say, animosity against this topic? Because it has gained some momentum, do you think? Or have you understood it a bit? Why this is more frequent than before? It depends on the attack. I've seen strange things. Since this year before summer, there's been many attacks coming from the US, especially among eco socialist communist groups, criticizing degrowth for somehow being a disguised way of imposing austerity into poor people. So these detractors even went arguing that we were secretly financed by, you know, capitalists like Bill Gates to create this whole narrative to force poor people to constrain their consumption so that we could leave even more resources available for the consumption of the risk, the rich, and make it morally acceptable. So here, I mean, that's a conspiracy theory. By the way, Bill Gates is listening as money to spare, absolutely okay to send it to the degrowth community. I can tell you, I've been in degrowth research in 2016 and there's just very little money in it. But what's interesting is the question you're asking, why are just people so scared about this? And from when I wrote this chapter of my thesis, but the history of the concept, it reminded me when I've learned about the history of sustainable development. And it faced similar criticism when it came out. People were just like, oh, that's green dictatorship. Oh, that's the North coming to impose austerity into poor countries. So we've seen like, now when you're studying degrowth controversies, actually, you can see waves of criticism that have attacked sustainable development, ecosocialism. Every time there's a concept linked, you know, more directly or indirectly to sustainability, or any concept really that is just a transformative that is aiming to change the status quo and the way we organize the economy, there's this strong reaction of, I suspect most of the time people will benefit from the system. You know, very often I go to debate with bankers and mainstream economists and they're like, our CEOs, people within company and they're like, yeah, we don't like degrowth. And then I can understand at least there will be the most valuable criticism. This one I've never received. But you know what, if people listening, if you want to have the ultimate criticism of degrowth is like, well, I'm a capitalist, I can make a lot of money with very little effort just on relying on the power of the property I already own. If somehow we redistribute wealth, well, it means I'm somehow going to lose that power. And that's true. You will. That's a fair criticism. And that for those, you know, a degrowth theory with is not that original in the sense of there are many other concepts that advocate for redistribution of wealth. For example, you know, like the participative socialism of Tomas Piketty here in France, that is just, you know, in terms of inequality goes in exactly in the same direction of than degrowth and sometime even further in the intricate way of reducing inequality. So here that will be an honest, you know, straight on criticism, but most of the one I hear are based on misunderstandings. And I'm not quite sure I still understand why this is so because like 10 years ago, perhaps, you know, you typed degrowth on Google, you have nothing, there is no books, you know, love stuff in French, the Wikipedia pages crap, you have no videos, perhaps you're left alone in your head and you're like, well, that should be the opposite of growth. So recession, recession means unemployment, means poverty, means bankruptcy. Okay, so that's bad, fair enough. But I mean, look at the material that is online. As you said, I've been collecting and digest. Yeah. And there's a lot of extremely good material, short videos, blog posts, books, podcasts like this one where people take the time to really clarify. So now I don't think there is an excuse for for someone, you know, publishing this just one pager being like degrowth is, I mean, I've read one like this published a month ago, where the main argument is degrowth, degrowth advocates, you know, killing children. That's the argument. Economic growth, you know, saves lives by reducing infant mortality. If you're again, economic growth, you're for increasing infant mortality. And so therefore, we advocates of degrowth are supporters of increasing infant mortality. I mean, that's, you know, that's flawless logic. How can you? Of course. Socrates is a human human, I don't know what. So Socrates is a dog. Yeah. Yeah. So you said you started your your PhD research around 2016. And that's where you you really started working on degrowth. Did you start it before that? How did you arrive a bit on this topic? Were you a social scientist, an economist before that? Or what was a bit your background? And how did you approach or arrive to the to this topic? It was a long way, slightly embarrassing way. So it's confession time, like, it's better to get it out. Let me put the candles. Yeah. So I started to study economics from day one at university. And at first, like many economics students, it was mainstream economics, nothing about the environment. I had to wait for year number three to get a course about environmental economics. Actually, after that, I just did an Erasmus exchange to Sweden. And back then, there was an environmental economics that was a bit more developed than in France. And as an economist, I arrived with so much arrogance, that's that the embarrassing part being like kind of change. What is that? Let me solve this in five seconds. Carbon tax. Boom. So I was like really like complicated equation. Yeah. And that's it. Exactly. Like then I was like, I can demonstrate to you mathematically how you're wrong. And with the carbon tax in just five minutes, you know, that problem is gone. So and when I did this, I think I felt, I felt into a black hole that is the complexity of sustainability issues and the intermingling of social and environmental justice. And I realized, you know, at that moment, that everything I had been learning for three years was more or less useless. I felt like, wow, I felt like too less. I could not understand the problem. You know, it was just very difficult. So I decided to equip myself. I was like, I need to, I need to, I need to get some tools to solve these. And so I've heard about ecological economics as an alternative school thought in economics to environmental economics. So I decided to stay in Sweden and study this from my masters. I actually did two masters in this, one in France, which was one of the first masters in environmental economics with some leaning towards ecological economics, then did one in Sweden more focused on ecological economics. And when you start to learn ecological economics, one of the first things is you conceptualize the economy as embedded within nature. So the thinnateness of the planet is one of your starting assumptions. So you're working with laws of biology and the laws of physics. And very quickly, you realize that, you know, this endless economic growth we assume as possible in mainstream economics. Well, that becomes like completely untenable within an ecological economics framework. And in doing this, then a stumbled like in the concept of degrowth. And I felt like for the first time, like the not only degrowth as a concept, but all the small concept that we have in the literature, you know, seeing economies as a societal metabolism, seeing like, you know, different theories of values, looking at all the theories that try to understand, you know, what's happening outside of the economy, thinking about the economy in terms of need satisfaction, thinking of different alternative property regimes. So looking at commons and hybrid commons, and not for profit ventures and all these things. So I felt that was a great toolbox to use. And I decided to, but it was messy. I mean, let's face it, back then when I entered in the field, I was like, it was a bit confusing. There was like a lot of wealth. It's like you're entering, you know, a secondhand market. It's huge. And you have like all those valuable stuff, but they're piled up together. And so you're like scaffolding, you're like, oh, wow, that's cool. That was me discovering degrowth. So during the thesis, I wanted to kind of share that experience that I've had been trying to put things in the right place. So that's what I developed during the thesis and it became a bit of an obsession. I must confess. Like all thesis, yeah. And I'm recovering from this. It can be quite long, the recovery phase. So do you still keep contact with your economist colleagues? I mean, how do you, you know, did they feel that you were crazy back in the day when you said what you discovered? I always feel this is kind of a long, lonely path for a certain moment until you finally feel equipped with these tools to really understand and back you up with okay, now I think I see the challenges. Now I think I see the problematic more clearly. So and then you feel eager to actually converse, to challenge, to argue, either with the previous, your previous, let's say, background or with, you know, be embraced and be part of this new groups of ecological economics. But how did this transition go? Did you discuss this with your fellow economists? Did they feel that you were kind of crazy? Or did no, actually, it was a whole cohort that went towards the same direction? No, there was not that many people. And I mean, still today, you don't have many economists just working on that topic. And I think my thesis in France, the first one, first PhD economics on the topic of degrowth. So that's, you know, it's just a, we're a few of us on a WhatsApp group, and that's pretty much a degrowth economist. But I can still notice that there's been a shift, even comparing to when I started to add this project about my thesis, you know, proposing in 2015, just before it started, and people looking at me like, why would we need degrowth since we have green growth? I don't understand, you know, the, why would you want to research this? Now, today, with so much better data about the failure and limits of green growth, and even environmental economists starting to freak out being like, do we have a plan B? Like, okay, so now, like, now you can justify that. Yeah, we're working on the plan B, you know, we're, the degrowth scholars, I feel we're a bit like a A team scholars, it's just like, we've been preparing this plan. And when everything else is failed, they just call us and we come with our plan and all like a bunch of heterodox policies like, okay, you're going to put the local job guarantee there. And then we're going to cap and share these emissions and local currencies. And we are going to tie it away with just some not for profit cooperatives. But it feels a bit like this. Now, like, on that sense, like there's more and more demand for these alternative ideas that before nobody really cared about. So there's a demand, but that doesn't come from economists that come from civil society, other intellectuals, decision makers that just realize that, you know, the old recipes don't work anymore. Just like, okay, you have structural unemployment you want to solve that. And you're just here pressing your GDP button and hoping that something happens. Like, okay, well, we've been doing this for quite a while. But breaking news, there's no more economic growth, secular stagnation. I mean, that's a mainstream economic concept. And it's just it's not ideological or what is just, you know, empirical run out. So you can keep pressing the button. And even if we have, you know, qualitatively, it's not the type of growth that's going to create, you know, the jobs you want. And if it does, you know, it's not guaranteed that these will be just jobs that will be enjoyed by the people that perform them. So you're like, here, we realize that your your GDP button is just, you know, it's the old Pac-Man button, you know, take it away and and give us, you know, a nice little xbox gear things with a lot of different buttons. So decision makers are asking for new solutions. Students are asking for new theories. I mean, the whole movement for pluralism and economics education. I think it's, it's, you know, all the economic students like Pauline Greta Thunberg move being like, you know, I'm not going to spend five years at university to learn, you know, triple the theory and green growth, and then find that it was just all the lie. Otherwise, you can do a, you know, a master's in Harry Potter studies or, you know, a lot of the rings theories. It's also very useful, but you do this perhaps more useful, but yeah, it's fine. We call it literature. I think if you do a master's in mainstream economics today, it's actually closer to cultural studies than it is from the social science. That was a harsh one, but it came from the heart. So students are asking for different theories and becomes more and more difficult for mainstream economists to legitimate their theories. One of my favorite story was after the subprime crisis of, you know, 2008, and the Queen of England, you know, send a little, had a little call to the economist at the London School of Economics and she was just, you know, Hi, I just only have a question for you. Why didn't you see it coming? And, you know, and so they had to write very awkward situation, a letter to answer this question. And the letter is priceless. I've got it framed in my office because it's so beautiful. We pushed the GDP button, but it didn't work. Exactly. We found out it was not connected actually, someone loved it. And so it's just anyway, it's technical, you're gonna really understand, you don't have a degree in economics. No, but their answer was even more shocking. It was a, and I quote, collective failure of imagination is just the way we've been thinking, but the economy did not allow us to see what was to come. And so ever since economists, their theories have been repeatedly put into shameful situation like this, where very noticeable events happen, like a global financial crisis or a planet threatening climate change, you know, the type of stuff you would want to see as an economist. So now I think it's making easier and easier to introduce yourself as well. I'm a tour docs economist. I work with feminist economics, with ecological economics, with Marxian economics, I'm trying to rebuild economic tools that are adapted to the Anthropocene and to, you know, the economy that we have today, and especially that can equip us to deal with the challenge they're just pressing today. So now I feel like I can finally get some respect when I get back to an economics department. But the funny thing is, since I published the thesis, I've been doing like maybe 60 events, you know, online and physical. And I don't think I've ever been invited by an economics department. I get invited by companies, governments, business schools, a lot of engineering schools are invited by, you know, the Polish governments and a podcast in Nepal, but an economics department caring about someone's study economic growth in relation to the environment, they're not quite there. So that's been lacking some imagination. Yeah, economist. It's never too late. If you want to hear about still possible. Oh, boy, yeah, it's funny. One of the I think the first chapters of Kate Railway was a book is about this whole economist curriculum about how we still continue to learn the same thing. And you would, you can argue the same thing about engineers, you can argue the same thing about a number of, of disciplines. However, I mean, it seems so obvious at least a non economist can see what's unfolding and kind of figure this out. So sometimes you wonder why an economist does not see it. But in any case, you briefly, you navigate it through it very quickly. But I think it's very important. You said, and we have more and more consistent data to back up that green growth doesn't work. Let's just settle this debate, the growth versus green growth and why you wrote a whole or co authored a whole report on why the coupling doesn't work. So I can imagine that you use this argument to say why green growth doesn't work, right? Yeah. Can you explain a bit what is the coupling? What is the growth green growth and why it doesn't work? Let's do it. Okay. So 10 years ago, you would just talk about the growth economists would say like, well, no need, we have green growth already. And they would put some, some graph today, you know, they would pick something on our world and data and show you look, that's GDP per capita, that's energy used, it's the coupling we're good. And it was very difficult to mingle into these numbers because there were just so many of them. But what has happened last year in June 2020 is significant. There's been the first exhaustive review of the decoupling literature. So that's 835 studies coming back, you know, to the invention of the concept of the coupling at the beginning of the 1990s. So these people, I mean, in decoupling debunked one year before, you know, we've been trying to do the same and we covered, you know, a few hundred, maybe 300 studies and vertical studies. But these people, they really been lifting every single rock knocking at every single village door. Do you have decoupling data? Give it to us. And they've done a proper job. There were a lot of respected scholars. And they really did a careful study. And they concluded the same thing that we did in decoupling debunked. And that's the argument that I'm going to make now is just that it's not a matter of saying that green growth is impossible. Of course, in theory, it's possible, because in theory, everything is possible, especially in mainstream theory, no classical theory. But, you know, that's not the question. The question is facing the type of climate deadline that we have. In that situation also, where we have an unfair development of the world and certain countries need to have access to natural resources more urgently than others, is green growth a viable strategy for ecological sustainability? And the answer to that question is no. And why is that? It all centers on the concept of decoupling, which is funny enough, because decoupling might be the most unappealing concept of it all. It sounds like a divorce, but you never hear people like psychologists and linguists being like, oh, don't talk about decoupling. It refers to divorce. People will not like it. Decoupling has become one of the mantra of every single international organization, which shows that negative term sometimes works. Anyway, decoupling meaning GDP, we want to keep it rising and environmental pressure, we want to decouple and have just more GDP, less pressures. And indeed, if we had this everywhere in the world, that would be good. But most of the time in most countries in the world, we have this. It continues. Then we have a lot of case of relative decoupling. So, GDP increase and there are a bit of efficiency, but it still climbs up. And very rarely, in a handful of countries, for a handful of selected impact, often just greenhouse gases, we have absolute decoupling. But the absolute decoupling is not like this. It's more like, you know, tiny, tiny, tiny less. So here, when you look at these and the time it takes for this reduction to happen, that makes me conclude that decoupling is just not fast enough. It's not big enough. It's not encompassing enough because, you know, if we take together impact on water use, waste disposal, greenhouse gases, mineral extraction, you know, soil usage, biodiversity loss, all the different impact that our economic activity has on the environment, that's what we need to decouple. Not only decarbonize the economy, that's like that's step one. So if you decarbonize the economy, but then you just rematerialize by just, you know, using a lot of minerals to build a constantly increasing renewable infrastructure, you've just shifted the problem elsewhere. So here we're falling into a very, I think, commonsensical realization, which is that when an economy grows, it gets bigger. And so I can also print on t-shirts and come on demand. So dropshipping. Yeah. If we have a resource, resource problem, climate change, for example, is an over pollution problem, too much emissions, and we want to reduce it, then, you know, shrinking the size of the economy, trying to just, you know, it seems like a commonsensical solution to do this. Then of course, if we get into the technical argument, it's not a choice between degrowth and green growth, it's just, they can be complementary. But in the current discussion, and that is slowly changing, but coming back to 10 years ago, people didn't see degrowth as a solution, they were like, it's only green growth. Now, I think I would want the discourse to shift towards recognizing that everything we can shrink today, especially high, very nature-intensive sectors through strategies of frugality, of sobriety, of sufficiency, of just cutting on, you know, all the production and consumption that, you know, leave well-being unchanged. So another very economically important, on reducing inequality, which is also as many negative effect on society, if we can do this and shrink a bit on natural resources, then it makes it easier to decouple. So I find here that even people that are hardcore green growth, I'm sure they would prefer to start from a smaller stack of natural resources being extracted and pollutions being emitted. So here we have the strategy I would like to say is just let's first do degrowth at this grand discussion about what part of the economy we would like to shrink, other part we would like to expand, what economic form that should take, should that be, you know, monetary production, do this. And then we focus on what the economy is about, producing that efficiently, which is, you know, using as low natural resources as we can, and then, you know, we fall back on on trying to find innovations to be able to do this, and some solutions that have been promoted in green growth. So last thing, then I finish on this, because very often people, they attack degrowth thirst for being counterproductive, because they're like, if you say that- So what do you propose? Yeah. You make the green growth people look bad. And so you make ecological effort look bad. And here I think we need to be a bit more subtle of just, you know, let's say green growth is not enough. Again, for ecological sustainability, then when we get into a broader criticism of economic growth as a phenomenon, you also have like, you know, social and cultural critiques. So you realize that even in an infinite world, there will still be some advantage to have an economy that is not just growing forever. But even that, so in that constrained world, just for ecological purposes, you can make the argument that just the economy should be smaller. And then you can pick a choose after this in a wide toolbox of tools, some part of the green growth discourse, some part of the degrowth discourse, some part of the ecofeminist, anarchist, or socialist, you pick it wherever you want to just make sure that the economy is just doing what it's supposed to be doing, satisfying needs, getting us, you know, above social minimum, and while remaining under ecological maxima, you know, that's the donut of Kate Rayworth. Yeah. So of course, I mean, it makes total sense that if you want to stop, you might turn off the tap first instead of, you know, putting buckets of water back to the back to the bathtub. All of this seems quite obvious. That obvious that it's always difficult to understand why it's not that obvious. But I want to, to perhaps discuss, so we talked about the green growth versus degrowth and what parts of it we should first degrow and then perhaps green grow or whatever afterwards. How, what is a good strategy to figure out this is a non-essential activity and we should cut it? Do we have like a matrix between needs and ecological footprint? And then we rank them and say, well, let's say in terms of mobility, that type of mobility is too high in ecological footprint yet doesn't make you happier or it's not essential for you to go to your job or to see your family. And therefore, that is perhaps something that we should take out of our system. Is that how we could approach this cutting off the unnecessary elements of our society? Or how would you go about, you know, pick and choose or prioritize the first sectors to take out of our economy? Let's realize that we already do this. So the system, our economy is already deciding, you know, what should be developed and what should not. Go to a bank and ask for a loan to start a business and tell them you want to start, I don't know, a chess club or a, you know, whatever. And they'll be like, well, sorry, but that's non-essential. You're not going to make any profit. So I would rather lend to someone that's going to create, you know, an online advertising agency. So we already have this rationing of productive powers, which is based on one single rule. We give money to where more money can be made. And of course, the exception of that is public investment, which can bypass this rule for a while, even though in today's neoliberal discourse, it is at some point in the future confronted to this ability to finance itself. That's the discussion we had earlier. So now the question is to rethink, how else could we do this? If we admit that somehow there are certain things that are valuable, but that there are no price and will not be profitable in a financial sense, how do we measure? How do we account? Where do we do this? I like to think of that process at many different levels, because economic decisions often when we hear, but degrowth people would be like imagining, I don't know, like an inventory at the government level, well, you know, you'll be sitting down in a room and people will, there'll be a grand list of just like white socks, unnecessary, white socks with red dot medium, and they'll give a grade. It never works like this. We need to tap into decisions. So they're taken at least three levels. We're going to start simple, starting with the company. A company decides what to produce, how much to produce, what tools to be used to produce. So now what or most of our companies are using as a protocol to do this? Well, profits. So what else to be used? If we take not-for-profit cooperatives that engage in very similar processes of production, the only difference is that they're trying to, let's say, they have a raison d'être, that is to focus on perhaps, you know, the satisfaction of a specific need. And so they're just making different decisions. So now I'm thinking, if we were in the French economy, let's say, where we have four millions companies to turn all of them into not-for-profit cooperatives, what kind of different decision-making would we make? Would some company decide somehow to produce these annoying puppet ads on the internet? Will someone be like, well, I think this is really going to improve, you know, the well-being of someone? And no, there are certain things that just are done just because they make money. If you take them away, different decisions will be taken. Same thing at the consumption level. So now I'm thinking, if you're, there are many constrained forms of consumption. If you want to live in Paris, you'll have to house yourself, or even worse, you know, in London. And if you want to do so, you know, you cannot register on a social housing list and get affordable housing quick. Now, you will have to just pay a precious amount of money because it's a private market. And so here there's another process of rationing based on purchasing power. The question is, should we ration a good as fundamental as housing based on purchasing power? Some people say, you know, they don't think so because it's, it's a fundamental need. Everyone should have a house. And so if you compare Paris to Vienna, in Vienna is one of the most affordable, the European capital. Why is that? Because 60% of all housing in Vienna is social housing. Part of it is state housing. But most of the new social housing is actually decentralized cooperative housing. It doesn't mean living together. It means your house is owned by a not-for-profit cooperative. And it means, you know, no one is making money out of housing. And that's why we see in Vienna is just affordable prices and high quality housing. So it shows that it's a different choice of political economy here. And that relates to different decisions. Same thing at the level of the state, where you can decide to either facilitate, you know, the production of commodities and the profits of companies, or you can decide also to invest in two sectors that produce social and ecological value, but that won't be financially profitable. So at each of these level, people will make decisions, will draw the line between what's essential and what's superfluous. That's why the concept of economic democracy is so important. Today, we draw the line when we buy stuff as consumers. So basically, that's the wallet democracy. If you're poor, well, nobody cares. If you're Elon Musk, the line you draw between the, you know, the cryptocurrency you choose, the car you decide to have, the place you decide to live, it's going to just shift the consumption patterns of a lot of different people. So I think today it's the goal of building democratic forums to host these discussions. So that's why I like the cooperative as a firm model, because you can include a lot of different stakeholders. And then at these democratic process of decision, where you're deciding how much to produce, and then, you know, you have representatives that are outside of the company that, you know, reflect perhaps, you know, the consequence that these could have on local ecosystems. You have representatives of future generations. You have, of course, representatives of workers of the municipality. So you can have this democratic decision. Same thing at the level of the country. I would like to see more event like the convention citoyenne pour le climat, which was a citizen convention organized by the French government. After the Gilets jaunes selected 150 different people and asked them, you know, what should we do to keep, you know, the Paris agreement and reduce our emissions of such and such. And they've produced a wonderful 500 page document with 149 policies where they drew the line like, well, okay, if we have to choose between having smaller cars and just, you know, not having cars, well, then we'll just decide to ban SUVs and do other things. If we have to choose between this and that, we choose this and that. So what I think the main, that's why it's often like Serge Latouche, one of the founder of degrowth in France, you know, it was talking of sortir de l'économie to exceed the economy. And I think that's what we should do today. We should step out of the economy and politicize that discussion. What do we want? Who benefit from this? Who wins? Who lose? And are we okay with this? Morally. If not, what do we do? And then we step back into the economy with all these social and ecological concern. And we use them to reform the economy game, forgetting about its inner inherent rules because, and that's the begging claim, be careful, an economy never has inherent fundamental universal rules. It never has a universal logic. An economy only has the logic that a community gives it. That's all so it can be shaped into anything. And for anyone that has studied economic history, and especially economic anthropology, like I did in my early years, you realize that there's just so many different ways of organizing economy that we've seen and so many different ways that are left to be invented. It's funny that this is an actual definition that it doesn't have like an inner motive economy, because it's as if economy now is its own zombie that feeds from humans to create more growth with. I'm wondering, so you mentioned an element of politics right now. You also mentioned biophysical elements beforehand. And your PhD title is political economy of degrowth. So I can sense there is a political element to what you conceive of degrowth. There is a biophysical one, but you also include two other pillars, right? When you define degrowth, I think you have four main pillars that you include. What are the other two? Or can you sum this up? Yeah, four pillars, sustainability, justice, well-being, democracy. So as we've discussed, degrowth first and foremost is this macroeconomic diet, reducing production and consumption to shrink the metabolism of an economy. But the second pillar is justice. We need to realize that emissions are concentrated, that in terms of need satisfactions, there is a divide between the North and the South, and there are divides within each country. So somehow we need to do this macroeconomic diet, but in a way that reducing equality, and actually we can turn the argument around, reducing inequality is going to facilitate this macroeconomic diet, because as we all know today, rich people are responsible for a large part of environmental pressures. The third pillar is well-being, and that's where the degrowth argument really gets original. Say, we're going to do a macroeconomic diet that's going to reduce inequality, and actually we're going to improve our well-being. So that at this point sounds a bit like those magical ads on the internet, like, you know, lose five seconds with this easy solution. Get this pill. The logic behind is this. First, societies with high levels of inequality are often societies that are just at low well-being. Well, let me say this like that. Everything being equal, if you compare two societies, one with very high level of inequalities and another one with low levels, the one with low levels of inequalities, it's going to be happier. So now there's this aspect of well-being, but there's something more fundamental having to do with this capitalism and economic growth coming with it. A legitimate and effective way of forgive my economic jargon maximizing, or we could say guaranteeing or safeguarding well-being. And the question is, if capitalism is always wired to, you know, produce and make decision based on what brings a monetary surplus, well, it's uncertain that, you know, there will be a correlation with what is profitable and what maximized well-being. So the degrowth argument is if we change our economic system by actually just writing down into the hardware, the institution, the way we frame companies, the way we organize trade patterns, the way we organize government activities, the way we give loans at the bank, each time we organize around the main goal of securing well-being, then we'll have a system that is more likely to increase well-being. That's the degrowth argument encapsulated with the slogan of less is more. And then we have the fourth criteria that is perhaps also the most important, because so far all of these criterias could be satisfied if you, you know, wear a well-dictator and you would decide to do this, this and that. And that's it. Done my diet, reduced inequality, increased well-being, all fine. Problem I don't think is such a society will work very long because you would refold into patterns of exploitation and you would rebuild inequality and some people's well-being will be marched on and ignored and you will have some trouble. So democracy is the only way to safeguard these three features over the very long term. And you cannot do without it because the macroeconomic diet, when should you decide when to stop? You know, we talked about it, the line drawn between the central and subethelios, but also, you know, the carbon budget. We have a carbon budget scientifically given by the IPCC. How do we divide it between, you know, the north and south and within a country between these industries and this industry? Democracy is the only way to sort this out. Same thing for inequality. What's an acceptable level of inequality? How high should we set the maximum wage? What kind of redistribution we should do in terms of inheritance or taxation of capital on property? Same thing. With healthy, with a healthy democracy, you can make decisions that somehow set, let's say, maximize the well-being of all, let's say, work for most people involved. And finally, same thing for well-being. Here, that's, we talked about the wallet democracy and the fact that using purchasing power decisions to decide what makes you happy or not just quickly reaches some limits in the society with high inequality. So here, democracy has the ability somehow to gather as consumer citizens and discuss, you know, perhaps we don't want to each pay our rent to, you know, a landlord in Paris. Perhaps we want to collectively organize as a cooperative and organize like this. So here we see that democracy is also enabling us to ensure that the economy remains malleable. So, and for an economy that remains malleable is an economy that remains resilient. So over the very long term, you could say that one of the most important objective of degrowth is to democratize the economy. So touching upon your last point, so the democracy and, well, which is inherent to politics as well, we touched upon it at the very beginning of the talk about how some French politicians are now even putting degrowth at the center focus of their campaigns. We have Delfin Batou, one of the ecologists that is now putting this very much forward, and she was previously the minister of ecology and environment. I don't remember what it was. So, well, I mean, now it's in the center stage. So we have degrowth at the main center stage. It has, well, it has brought forward a lot of reactions by everyone, like in the previous, and you wrote a reaction to this. They were primary debates among ecologists. And degrowth was one of these words that was like, okay, are you against or are you for degrowth? And so it seems that degrowth might slowly start entering the political landscape by being a sentence, a term that's going to help identify where people sit within politics. So, I mean, clearly, if you are pro-degrowth, you have a huge stance. You really are not chewing your words. You're really, you know, putting it out there. So I'm just wondering, what do you think? Is this a political suicide mode? Is it something new that we're going to see more and more? How do you feel about seeing degrowth in politics? Personally, I feel, I feel this is a necessary debate. So I'm happy that I've seen better voted to politics. Many people say it's a political suicide. And I think we'll just have to wait 10 days to know since the vote for the party has started just this week. But what's been interesting and what I've been tracking in that article you referred to is the kind of discussions that surrounded the concept. So, you know, there have been a few debates with these five candidates and every time there's the degrowth question and they have to each take position towards the concept. And I think the fact that we're asking the degrowth question is, has been deepening some of the discussions that did not happen before. Like during a presidential debate, they will not, people will not be like, are you for or against capitalism? You know, are you for or against the continuation of extractive practices in the global south? So these questions that are just, I think fundamentally important to understand the bio crisis today have been somewhat sneakily introduced in the Trojan horse of degrowth as a concept. So Delphine Bateau here, again, will wait for the vote, but she's gained a lot of popularity by this. I think billing to the concept of degrowth, not being afraid of tackling the difficult questions and also of doing the kind of homework of adapting your discourse to concept that have emerged that activists are using. I mean, if you're the leader of the Green Party, you need to be close from the concept that are happening with the sustainability scientists and activists, environmental activists. And as we were discussing in the beginning, degrowth is becoming increasingly popular. So now I find it strange for other candidates to be like, one of them just, when being asked about degrowth, always give the same answer like, I don't care about it. I don't care at all. I don't care about growth, don't care about degrowth. I care about sustainability, I care about health, I care about the thing that degrowth is about. So you're like, that's it. I don't care what degrowth is, or this is ingenious. And they're both problematic stances. But the debate is that, so the four other candidates, the position they took, any of these positions were superficial in the sense of it started from a misunderstanding of degrowth. So you could see that did not take time to engage with the concept. So they would be like, I don't like degrowth, because GDP is an absolute indicator. And I don't think a society should be organized around the misation of GDP. And I mean, that's degrowth one-on-one. Even if you've read the Wikipedia page, you know that it's not a recession. Honey has shrunk the kid applied to your economy, until it's just a tiny, cute little political strategy in taking this ambiguous position, or if it's just a genuine disregard of that concept. But then now I'm going to get a bit more, okay, outrageous and make that claim. I feel like if you're an ecologist today, so here we're not yet in the presidential, you know, it's the election of the leader of the Green Party that will be a candidate for the general election. So we're only talking about ecologists so far. If you're an ecologist and you're against degrowth, you know, it would be like being a doctor that it against diets in general. You're like, I don't think you could be a doctor. I do hope so. Maybe there's a movement of doctors that are just literally against diets, whatever happens, any situation I'm against a diet, whatever your problem you should always eat more. You get things but always eat more. That'll be strange. So now as ecologists, I think, and reality is just teaching us so much about it. I was referring to the new data, but you don't need the data. Look at the forest fire. Look at, you know, the fishery collapse. Look at climate change. Look at heat waves. Look at environmental refugees. And all these things, reality is teaching us in the most painful manner that somehow, you know, this, we will have to make a choice. We cannot continue that what we have. So I find problematic that in 2021, there are some, you know, leaders, aspiring leaders of a green party that we, you know, start from an ambiguous positions towards economic growth. And so that's, that's the feeling with Delphine Bato coming here, at least she has forced them to take position, but many of them kind of like decline. And that's still a risk today in the discourse of people, you know, when you talk to them about degrowth, most of the time economists, they'll be like, oh, you know, I know GDP is, is bad indicators, not about this, the economy is a bit well-being, let's keep doing what we're doing. So now it's very important to, it's not about degrowth in the sense of it's not only about the diet, it's about all the things we've been discussing, the political discussion about inequality. It's about the question of well-being, the use of our time, the relation we have with nature is about the, you know, how an economy interacts with democracy, and how we come to make all the economic decisions that we make. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm curious to see where that goes, to be honest. I'm looking forward to see where this adventure comes. And even if Delphine is not the primary ecologist, how this might be used or not used by the other political parties. Perhaps to summarize whatever we've learned so far, because we mainly focus on cities, or we try at least within this podcast, you now live in Biharitz. Let's imagine that you're the mayor of Biharitz and degrowth, with your degrowth stick, what would be some of the steps, or how would you translate your knowledge into some actions, or into some, let's say, initiatives that you would rally citizens and companies and people within Biharitz. Economic growth, the way I conceptualize it, is like an engine that's self-implifying. So for me, degrowth is about, you know, stopping the engine. It's an engine of production, an engine of consumption, both like self-implificating. So as the mayor of Biharitz, I would just ban advertising in the street, you know, like it's been done in Grenoble and several other cities. I would also, you know, constrain not only public advertising, but also as much as I can, online advertising. And let's say every single pressure to consume, having to do with publicity or planned obsolescence, should become, you know, banned or heavily taxed or whatever tools. So here we can shrink the engine of consumption. To do this as well, I would want to rethink consumption through the lens of well-being, being like, okay, I'm the mayor of Biharitz. How can the people of Biharitz be happy in their daily lives without having to consume going to the mall? And then you realize that actually, you know, keeping a forest in good shape and public park and, you know, developing the infrastructure around surfing so that it's available to an affordable for people to do. Same thing with, so giving people option to find ways of entertaining themselves, meeting, relating to each other without having to rely on consuming every time more commodities. Here we're constraining consumption. Then I'll go hard on production too. I'll be like starting by doing democratic inventories in the city of the type of activities we want, the type of activities we don't want. So that's like local industrial policy. I'm a surfer, I surf every day. You can, you know, the pollution is there. We have the harbor of bayon issues related to overfishing and, you know, mass transport of good. The water is very often polluted. So here it's an experience of in a city that is just close to the ocean, you have to this relation to nature. So now I would want to bring that discussion, okay, we are a coastal city and we also, we are a city that is producing things to, you know, goods and services that we do to satisfy our needs. How do these two cohabit? There are certain things that actually can identify as being like low, well-being, high, ecologically intensive product that we could phase out. So I would like, yeah, these are the type of things. And then to do this, it starts with work time reduction. Because how can you have these discussions? How can you mobilize people into organizing alternative forms of economy if they're just too busy working for a company, most of the time working producing things that don't directly consume or don't have a lot of fun producing. So this is overall, I think, and to develop a bit more the link with cities, when we're thinking of democratizing the economy, it necessarily means relocalizing production and consumption. And necessarily, because if you want to have a democratic forum where, you know, producers and consumers and all the people that are kind of bearing the consequences of that production and consumption, they can all be in the same room, then you minimize the risk of exploitation because at some point I'm going to be like, dude, listen, I'm surfing every day and you cleaning your boats of oil just straight on my spot is just not cool. But if the boat is cleaning, you know, their oil like in a faraway country, we never see and care, it makes it way easier for us not to care about. So relocalizing and productive activities is a way of somehow bringing them back within the realm of democracy. And there are many other tools to do this local currencies is a great way because that also repoliticized money in the sense of today money is the bank have monopoly in creating and destroying it. But with local currencies it actually we can have local monetary policy where we decide somehow to use the money to invest into new sectors to create new money to boost or stimulate certain activities like with time banks that we're not finding any finance and funds under a normal capitalist economy. So here's a few changes that probably make everyone realize I do a terrible job at being the mayor. So this is not a new official application. But if the mayor of Geertz does want to hear my recommendation, I'll be more than happy to look into it. I would vote for you. And if you need any help, if you need any help in doing these surveys and all of that, just ring me. I'll come to be a reader like this. Yeah, exactly. I just want to find an excuse, a professional excuse to come visit you. Okay, perhaps let's wrap this up with with two main questions that we ask, which is what do you work on? Let's say in the for the rest of the year or 2022, do you have any big projects? And then perhaps some recommendations on book articles, films or something like that. Okay, yeah, big project. Yes. So now I'm finishing a book in French that should be published at the beginning of next year will be a summary of the thesis, not only a summary, but also a more exciting version, more entertaining version of the thesis. I'm currently discussing to do a book in English to that maybe we'll focus on the controversies. So reply to critiques and reflect on hot concepts and hot questions. So I would like to spend part of 2022 doing this. And then with some colleagues at Barcelona, we're working and somehow refining that theory of economic growth as a process embedded in the biosphere and in social communities. So this is kind of merging ecological insights on ecological economics and feminist economics to strengthen the point that that concept of economic growth as social ecological limits. So I would want to bring that insight in a convincing manner into the world of economics. So that's so far it's mainly the it's made in the degree of literature, but I would love to be able to bring right a strong article and add this debate with economists. That's that's on the research level. Then the growth is getting cool. So I've got a lot of events and courses, and I'll keep doing this. I think it's one of the responsibility of our course, you could say, of having written a thesis on the topic. So every time someone wants to have degrowth explained, ring my phone and I'll do this with pleasure. So 0800 degrowth. Yeah, 10 euros per minute. Well, 10 local units, depending on where they call from. And as for recommendation, there's been a few good books recently published on on degrowth, a very short one called the case for degrowth. If you want to get into the topic, there's Jason Hickel, Less is More. That is one of my favorites. And another tiny book from Jargo's Callis called Limits, why Malta was wrong and why environmentalist should care. Do not underestimate this book, which is not only one of the most beautifully written book I've ever read, but also making the degrowth argument without using the degrowth word and building a theory of limit that is extremely precious today. A film. Okay, I'm going to give you a film that's most probably you haven't seen. It's called long year 01. It's from 1973. It's a black and white low budget amateur theater utopian film about the post May 68 spirit in France, you know, there was this huge revolt. And so the movie is explaining basically, and I use it a bit in the thesis, all start from the assumption that in one year, okay, we realized the society is unsustainable. In one year, we stop completely and we discuss and we redesign society. So there's this funny film about them doing this and rethinking property and it's actually quite stimulating and exciting. And if any Hollywood producer is watching this and wants to do a long do just get in touch and we'll discuss their revenge. Yeah. Well, thanks so much. You've said so many different people should watch this and listen to this. So I hope the mayor of BRH is going to watch this. I hope Hollywood producers and so many other people are going to watch this and I'm counting on you everyone to share it with everyone that should listen to this episode. Thanks again, Tim, for all of your time. I hope I'm going to meet you soon in physical. And if you are in the alps, just, you know, I have some nice places to show you around as well. Thanks everyone and we'll see you on the next episode. Bye. Cheers.