A common objection to calls for demand reduction and degrowth comes from defenders of the status quo:
"From those who live in already wealthy countries, it's a bit rich expecting poorer and developing countries to abandon growth and leave their populations in poverty in perpetuity. When the world is equal, then growth can be abandoned. Until then, keep your privileged opinions to yourselves."
First, it's worth mentioning this critique was leveled at an article specifically calling for degrowth in America—the world's richest nation, and never even mentioned developing (plundered) nations. Still, let's engage it head-on anyway.
The argument sounds intuitive—who could oppose poor countries getting rich?—but it ultimately rests on a false choice and a narrow, elite definition of "growth." Here's why it falls apart.
- It assumes “growth” automatically equals justice for the poor.
In practice, decades of high GDP growth in many countries have enriched domestic elites and foreign investors far more than the poorest people. Trickle‑down barely trickles. If the point is lifting people out of poverty, we should talk about land reform, public services, wealth redistribution, labor rights, and global debt relief—not just aggregate growth statistics. - It ignores that rich-country growth is still built on extracting from poorer countries.
The Global North’s “right to keep growing” is often exercised through resource grabs, unequal trade terms, offshored pollution, and corporate control over mines, land, and supply chains. That’s not poor countries “catching up”; it’s continued colonial relations under a green or humanitarian veneer. - It treats ecological limits as negotiable, when the poorest are hit first by overshoot.
Climate chaos, extreme heat, crop failures, and water stress already fall hardest on low-income communities and Global South countries. Saying “we’ll abandon growth when the world is equal” is like saying “we’ll stop bailing toxic waste into the river once everyone has had a turn drinking from it.” The longer we delay, the more impossible both equality and ecological stability become. - It erases radically different paths to improving lives.
You can massively improve well-being—through public healthcare, education, housing, food sovereignty, democratic control over resources—without copying the rich world’s hyper-consumerist, car‑dependent, waste‑driven model. “Growth in what?” is the real question. Growth in arms sales, luxury housing, private jets and SUVs does nothing for the global poor and wrecks the climate they rely on. - It weaponizes “privilege” to defend the status quo.
Yes, it is hypocritical when affluent people preach austerity for others while maintaining obscene consumption themselves. But that’s an argument for rapid downscaling of rich-world footprints and redistribution, not for extending a destructive model everywhere. Calling any criticism of growth “privileged” flips reality: the most privileged are the ones insisting their right to endless accumulation is untouchable. - A just position is: contract and converge.
Rich countries must dramatically reduce material and energy throughput while guaranteeing high living standards through equality and public provisioning. Poorer countries should be supported—via reparations, technology transfer, debt cancellation—to expand what actually matters: clean water, food, shelter, healthcare, education, and democratic control, without being locked into fossil‑capitalist dependence.
So the choice is not “either we accept endless growth or we doom poor countries to permanent poverty.” The real choice is between:
- continuing an extractive, elite-driven growth model that guarantees both ecological collapse and entrenched inequality, or
- deliberately shrinking destructive consumption at the top while enabling dignified living standards for everyone within planetary limits.
Demanding the latter isn’t “privileged.” Defending the former is.