That said, Pilling is also clear that "the aim of the book is not to declare war on growth" and he knows that "some will fault it for that". I am not sure that we can declare "war" on growth like this, as I'm not sure that's a helpful process. In fact I think that with these words Pilling is essentially saying he is not going to oppose capitalism - though his book contains a myriad of examples of how the capitalist system - and its inherent growth - do not help the mass of the population or the environment.
Much of the first part of the book is a study of Gross Domestic Production, the statistics that economists use to understand economies and growth. He notes the limitations of this approach, which reduce complex economic activity to pure numbers, creating snapshots of activities and simultaneously ignoring key activities. Pilling writes:
If GDP were a person, it would be indifferent, blind even, to morality. It measures production of whatever kind, good or bad. GDP likes pollution, particularly if you have to spend money clearing it up. It likes crime because it is fond of large police forces and repairing broken windows. GDP likes Hurricane Katrina and is quit OK with wars. It likes to measure the build-up to conflict in guns, planes and warheads, then it likes to count all the effort in reconstructing shattered cities from the smouldering ruins... GDP is mercenary. It doesn't deign to count transactions where no money changes hands. It doesn't like housework... and it shuns all volunteer activities.
Capitalists using GDP as a measure of economic activity is fascinating in itself because it essentially ignores the things that it doesn't care about. Domestic labour, which is predominantly done by women, doesn't figure - though paying for childcare would. Similarly those activities that are so important to us as people are ignored. If I pay someone to decorate my house it contributes to GDP. If I invite friends around, order pizza and they collectively do the decorating, GDP doesn't care. Our lives are fulfilled by the process, but capitalism fails to benefit.
But GDP doesn't just fail as a measure in the personal, or community, regard. It also fails as a measure of economies because it is "biased in favour of private over public provision". Pilling points out that the larger the public sector/welfare state of a country, the more we fail to grasp the size of the economy by using measures like GDP.
But the most useful parts of the book are those that are directly pertinent to the debate on growth/degrowth. These are the parts that demonstrate that growth (however it is measured) doesn't benefit everyone. There are some staggering statistics that compare growth rates in various countries with average wages or other measures of inequality. They prove, time and again, that growth is something that benefits the capitalist economy, and the already rich. As Pilling notes:
In wealthy countries the share of national income paid to workers fell from around 55 percent in 19i70 to below 50 percent at the height of the 2007 financial bubble. An expanding economy has not, in other words, primarily benefited the workers who produced all that growth, rather the owners of capital.
Later he concludes that "the fact that an economy is growing tells you nothing about what is happening to the distribution of wealth".
What is the alternative to this? Pilling's answers mostly rely on arguing that we need to get away from the concept of growth as being the only way of improving the economy, and use different measurements to understand what is happening within a particular country's economy. There is of course some truth in this, but the reality is that growth is locked into capitalism as a system, and while we can improve this or that aspect of it through reforms, expanding public services and not worrying what this does to GDP, we have also to look to how we improve the lot of ordinary people. Here we must look to the power of those that "create the growth" in Pilling's words. Workers striking for better wages, conditions and public services do so against a system that is driven by the growth imperative. They can wrest a bigger piece of the pie from the capitalists. Ultimately, as a Marxist I would also argue that in doing this workers can begin the process of shattering the capitalist system and creating a world were GDP makes no sense at all. Pilling's probably would not agree with this, but his book certainly has some insights that can help our side confront this unequal system.
Related Reviews
Kallis, Paulson, D'Alisa & Demaria - The Case for Degrowth
Hickel - Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World
Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
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