Europe | Charlemagne

Meet the lefty Europeans who want to shrink the economy

De-growers of the world, unite!

In 1972 a 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”.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Meet the de-growers”

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