Economists Chart New Roadmap to Replace Doomed Growth Strategy
The crisis room assumes it knows the precise quantity of prosperity required for human flourishing, and that this quantity can be calculated, capped, and administered by a committee of experts without destroying the very mechanism that generates it. It does not. Here is what happens when it acts as though it does.
The recent proposal by Olivier De Schutter, alongside various UN agencies and grassroots movements, to discard economic growth as a “doomed strategy” in favor of a designed roadmap is an exercise in the fatal conceit. The proponents believe they possess the knowledge to reorganize global resource allocation and social organization from the top down. They argue that the spontaneous order of the market - often mischaracterized as mere “growth” - is inherently destructive and must be replaced by a deliberate plan. This is not merely a disagreement over policy; it is a fundamental error of epistemology. The planners claim to know what is best for the global population, but they lack the information that exists only in the minds of millions of individual actors.
To understand the gravity of this error, one must distinguish between a made order and a spontaneous order. A made order, like an army or a factory, is designed for a specific purpose by a specific mind. It works because the designer knows the goal and the means. But society is not a factory. It is a spontaneous order, a complex system that has evolved over centuries through the interaction of countless individuals pursuing their own ends. The price system is the central nervous system of this order. It is not a moral judgment; it is a communication network. Prices signal scarcity, value, and opportunity in a language that no central authority can replicate. When De Schutter and his colleagues propose a roadmap to replace growth, they are essentially proposing to cut the nerves of the body while claiming they can still move the limbs by thought alone.
The claim that growth is “doomed” is a contested interpretation, but the deeper issue is the assumption that a better alternative can be designed. The roadmap relies on the premise that UN agencies and grassroots movements can aggregate the dispersed knowledge of billions of people. They cannot. The information required to allocate resources efficiently is not static data that can be collected in a database; it is local, tacit, and constantly changing. It resides in the knowledge of time and place. A farmer in Kenya knows the soil conditions of his field; a factory manager in Germany knows the reliability of his supply chain. No UN agency can know this. By suppressing the price signals that guide these individuals, the proposed roadmap does not solve the problem of resource allocation; it obliterates the information necessary to solve it.
This matters profoundly for political leaders and global populations because the consequences of such interventions are not limited to inefficiency. They extend to the erosion of liberty. When a central authority takes on the task of directing economic life, it must inevitably dictate the ends to which resources are devoted. If growth is deemed “doomed,” then what is the goal? Equity? Sustainability? Stability? These are vague concepts that require definition by the planner. Once the planner defines the goal, he must enforce it. This leads to a ratchet effect: every intervention creates new distortions, which require further interventions to correct. The roadmap begins as a gentle guide and ends as a rigid straitjacket, not because the planners are malicious, but because they are ignorant. They are trying to steer a ship without a compass, relying instead on their own sense of direction.
The legitimate concerns raised by the grassroots movements - environmental degradation, inequality, social dislocation - are real. But the proposed solution makes these problems worse by removing the feedback mechanisms that allow societies to adapt. The market does not care about the environment or equality; it cares about satisfying human wants within the constraints of available resources. But it does so by forcing individuals to confront the true cost of their actions. If we remove the price signals, we remove the incentive to conserve, to innovate, and to respect the rights of others. We replace a system of mutual adjustment with a system of coercion.
The constitutional question, then, is not whether we should have growth, but whether we should trust the spontaneous order to handle the complexity of human needs. The alternative is not a utopia of planned harmony, but a descent into serfdom, where the individual is reduced to a cog in a machine designed by men who believe they know better than the sum of all human experience. The roadmap offered by De Schutter is well-intentioned, but it is built on a foundation of sand. It assumes that knowledge can be centralized when it is, by nature, dispersed. In doing so, it promises order but delivers only chaos, managed by the arbitrary will of the few.