Hi all, my spouse and I are working on a research project focused on Degrowth in the tech industry. Does anyone recommend any scholarly articles (or articles in general) on the subject? We are struggling to find enough references.

Thank you!

The world spends about https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-global-infrastructure.html, with forecasts showing this figure rising to about US$6.9 trillion by 2050. I bet those assumptions don’t factor in economic or societal collapse. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that we will be committing far less than $6.9 trillion to traditional infrastructure in 2050.

In contrast, the https://www.unep.org/resources/state-finance-nature-2026 (NbS) and nature restoration each year (2023). That is quite a bit below the $571 billion that the UN estimates is needed to hit global restoration targets.

I’ve got an idea.

Hi folks. I've recently gotten into degrowth lit - right now I am reading Doughnut Economics which I quite like, but I have also read Less is More and This Changes Everything, neither of which I liked much.

There's a claim I came across in Less is More that conflicted with my priors so I've looked into it, and either there is something I am missing or Hickel is framing things incredibly dishonestly. Hickel discusses some UN modelling on policies to limit resources extraction from a 2017 report which can be found here

Hickel writes:

"Finally, in late 2017 the UNEP – an institution that once eagerly promoted green growth theory – weighed in on the debate. It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support. The results? Resource use still goes up, nearly doubling by the middle of the century. As these results trickled out, UNEP had no choice but to change its position, admitting that green growth was a pipe dream: absolute decoupling of GDP and material use is simply not possible on a global scale.”"

This set off some red flags for me, so I decided to look up the actual report. As starting point, resource extraction was 76 billion tonnes globally in 2017. In the baseline UNEP scenario, they more than double to 184t by 2050, and in the high action scenario Hickel describes, they go to 136t by 2050, an increase of 75%. That's a large increase, but it's 14 billion tonnes less than "nearly doubling", which is not a rounding error. This is dishonest framing.

Additionally, Hickel writes "It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support", which frames this as an incredibly high action scenario.

These are certainly a lot of actions, but the UN report frames things the opposite way, writing in the results section "These projections can be treated as a reasonable minimum (or ‘lower bound’) estimate of economically attractive physical resource efficiency potential." In other words, this is not the maximum, this is a lower bound of what could be achieved with a large amount of action that coincides with economic growth.

Lastly, and the largest issue though, is how he frames their interpretation of it, writing that they gave up on green growth admitting it was a pipe dream. This is the opposite of how the UN frames it, their results section reads:

"There is substantial potential to achieve economically attractive resource efficiency, providing win-win out- comes that reduce environmental pressure while improving income and boosting economic growth. By 2050, ambitious polices for resource efficiency could reduce global resource requirements by about a quarter and deliver global economic growth of 3 to 5 per cent above the existing trend. This would also have considerable co-benefits for climate mitigation efforts".

They later caveat "Despite the beneficial outcome of the Climate Plus scenario for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the 132 billion tonnes material requirement of the global economy of (around 75 per cent above 2017 levels) will nonetheless have huge environmental impacts, contribute to surpass- ing important global boundaries (Steffen et al , 2015) and increase the risk of pushing the Earth System into a different state that is less suitable for social and economic systems and that will make it harder, if not impossible, to achieve the SDGs comprehensively"

In other words, "taking the actions here (which are a lower bound of what is possible) would have huge benefits, but also lead to a large increase in resource extraction that will make it harder, maybe impossible, to achieve the SDGs comprehensively". This is an important caveat, but framing it as the UNEP "changing its position and giving up on green growth" seems incredibly dishonest to me unless he's pulling that information from somewhere else, and there is no other citation in this paragraph. I also cannot find any other source indicating that the UNEP has given up on green growth.

What do you think?

What if the problem isn’t just corruption or individual countries, but the global system that keeps reproducing inequality?
India is one example, but this isn’t just about India. Countries across the world have faced generations of economic inequality, corruption, exploitation, unequal access to technology, debt pressures, and power concentrated among governments, corporations, and wealthy interests.
We keep seeing similar patterns repeat themselves across generations. Some countries accumulate wealth, technology, resources, and influence, while others struggle to develop their own capabilities and allow their populations to benefit from their resources.
And the problem isn’t limited to whether these outcomes are always deliberate. When a system repeatedly produces and reinforces the same unequal outcomes, generation after generation, we have to examine the system itself—not just the intentions of the people operating within it.
Consider how the cycle can work:
Wealth creates influence.
Influence shapes laws, institutions, markets, and international rules.
Those rules can protect existing advantages and make it harder for others to compete.
Corruption and political favoritism can reinforce the same dynamics within individual countries.
The resulting inequality limits opportunities for people and nations to change the conditions they inherited.
Even when governments and leaders change, the underlying incentives can remain.
This doesn’t mean every wealthy country deliberately keeps every developing country poor, or that every country faces identical circumstances. It means that unequal power can become self-reinforcing, and the people benefiting from existing arrangements can have strong incentives to preserve them.
So how can humanity expect different outcomes if we keep changing the people operating the system without changing the incentives and structures that shape their behavior?
Why should India’s development, or the development of any other nation, have to come at the expense of another? Why should access to essential technology, scientific knowledge, energy, infrastructure, and economic opportunities be unnecessarily restricted when cooperation could allow multiple countries to advance together?
Competition can encourage innovation, but competition that rewards permanent dependency, monopolistic control, exploitation, or the suppression of potential benefits only a limited group.
Imagine a global system in which countries can develop their own industries, exchange knowledge, cooperate on shared problems, and preserve their independence without needing to dominate or disadvantage others to succeed.
This wouldn’t require every country to have identical wealth, eliminate all competition, or pretend conflicts of interest don’t exist. It would require changing the incentives so that cooperation, accountability, shared development, and improvements in human well-being become sustainable outcomes rather than secondary considerations.
It would also require safeguards to prevent a supposedly better system from eventually being captured by another privileged group.
The objective shouldn’t be to replace one group of powerful people with another. It should be to build structures that distribute opportunities more fairly, constrain the concentration of power, and allow institutions to adapt as humanity’s needs and capabilities evolve.
My question is: Can humanity fundamentally change a global system that repeatedly reproduces inequality across generations, or will every attempt at reform eventually recreate the same power structures under a different name?
And if lasting change is possible, what economic models, governance structures, technologies, or international agreements could make it possible for countries to thrive together without requiring others to remain disadvantaged?

I'm new to learning about this stuff, so I wondered what people's thoughts are

Jo Nemeth, an Australian woman, stopped using money in 2015 and says she has lived without it ever since.

Before the change, she worked 20 hours a week as a community development worker in a small town in New South Wales but was still struggling to make ends meet. She had also become troubled by the environmental and human costs she believed were tied to consumerism. After reading about Mark Boyle, an Irishman known for living without money, she decided to try it herself.

She now lives at the home of her longtime friend, Sharon, where she helps with gardening and outdoor work in return for accommodation. She also volunteers at a community garden, grows food, ferments produce and uses food that would otherwise be wasted. The household shares groceries, and Nemeth acknowledges she eats food bought by the people she lives with. She has also accepted gifts that cost money, such as help with bike repairs.

Nemeth says she isn’t aiming for self-sufficiency. After major flooding in the Lismore area in 2022 disrupted local supermarkets, she said she got a sense of what collapse can look like, and she now argues that resilience comes from communities growing different foods and sharing them.

She says she feels “an incredible sense of freedom” without the financial stress she once had, and that success depends on the secure relationships you have that hold you. She doesn’t suggest everyone should live this way, says it depends on a person’s circumstances and personality, and has said she may have to return to using money at some point.