Coopreneurs and the post-growth economy
We meet again
We live all in different places and mostly work remote together, so every time we meet in person it's an event and it's always a lot of fun. This time we came together to talk about a post-growth economy, the role cooperation plays in this and why we think a project like the Coopreneurs will help this transition. We are honored by having had a team producing a radio feature about zero-growth economy for NDR Kultur as guests for our discussion.
What's a post-growth economy?
The post-growth movement asks one simple question: Do we need unconditional growth in our economy and society or is there another way? It all starts from a simple observation: The resources of our planet are finite. If we grow our economy, our production and consumption without limits, how can this all work out if we have finite resources available? A school kid will realise that this cannot work and we are seeing the consequences of unlimited growth right now. The consequences it has on our planet and the consequences it has on our society. And more and more people do not like what they see.
In the interview we talked about the many reasons for this growth fetish, the consequences and what a post-growth society might look like. It is dangerous to replace one dogma with another, to replace a focus on growth with an abolishment of growth. Growth is in itself just a manifestation of a dynamic system and nothing is wrong with dynamic. The important question is Growth of what? and Growth for what?
The underlying assumption of all neoclassical economics is that people are better off, when the have more stuff. So producing more stuff and making it more affordable will maximise overall well being and therefore ethically justify growth, because overall it will work out. There will be winners and losers but all in all we will be better off. However, it is widely known in the scientific community that more stuff doesn't make us more happy. That indeed there is only a slight positive correlation and more other factors influence happiness more strongly than income alone. It is also widely known that losers might be geographically centred and whole communities get destroyed, but this is a whole other story justifying a blog post by itself.
So if more stuff doesn't make us more happy, are we measuring the right metric? Clearly not. Growth usually refers to the GDP which is just a measure of the economic activity in a country. It doesn't say if this activity is desirable. E.g. a 50% increase in prices for a cancer medicine will increase the GDP. Is this good or desirable? Probably not. So one might be tempted to think that growth is bad. Do we need growth after all?
Why we think growth is necessary
Most damnation of growth might happen out of the right reasons but many social entrepreneurs fail to scale. Growing and talking about growth got undesirable in some communities. But in this case it's not growing for it's own sake, it's growing to increase the positive impact in the world around us, and therefore a desirable form of growth. The question we asked ourselves is, how can we increase and expand the positive impact we have in the world and at the same time don't fall into the scaling trap of getting disconnected from the local communities we want to serve.
First of all, we think the Coopreneurship Principles of Collaboration, Participation, Sustainability and Purpose will help us to decide consciously in each step of our journey if growth is necessary and why it is necessary. We believe that an economy based on collaboration instead of competition will make us all better off. Will make us more happy and more fulfilled. We believe in strong ownership, we all do better work have a better impact in our lives if we own together what we create, together.
Heavily influenced by the open source software community, we think scaling by replication is the best way to grow the positive impact, while keeping the communities small enough for cooperative principles to work best. Consequently we defined in our statutes the explicit purpose of replication of the Coopreneurship principles anywhere possible. Just like the open source community we encourage copying of our concept, experimenting with it, adjusting it and sharing the learnings back to the community.
We think that a post-growth economy will still grow. But this time, we need to make sure that we grow the right things, that we measure the right things and that we come back to the initial purpose of serving the communities we live in.
If you want to learn more or join us in our journey, read our Manifesto or join our Meetup!
Shai, Or, Richard, Sascha and Tom