Debunking Green Growth with Timothée Parrique

For this episode of Post-Growth Australia Podcast, we go international by welcoming our esteemed guest Timothée Parrique, who is based in France and Sweden. Timothée is an economist at the School of Economics and Management of Lund University (Sweden). He has built a steady reputation as a colourful writer and speaker on the fallacies of our growth-based economy and is a loud and proud advocate of Degrowth, Post-Growth and Steady State based solutions.

Topics discussed with Timothée in this episode include:

• Reflections on the Degrowth movement within Europe, with particular focus on the 2023 Beyond Growth conference held at the EU parliament.

• Why “green growth” and economic decoupling are fallacies that are not backed by scientific evidence.

• Why demography is not an economic problem and why tinkering with demography won’t provide economic solutions.

• Timothée’s personal vision for a post-growth world (involving much more social equity and much less advertising).

We think you will agree that Timothée is a fantastic speaker on these issues, whose colourful use of metaphor and imagery makes for an engaging conversation.

We encourage you to read his article: “A response to The Economist: Shut up and let me grow”. This was an assertive response The Economist who wrote a critique of the 2023 Beyond Growth Conference, titled “Meet the lefty Europeans who want to deliberately shrink the economy.” Indeed.

There are many great YouTube videos highlighting Timothée’s impressive public speaking legacy. This Tedx Talk (which has attracted nearly 130 000 views) is in French, but if you don’t speak the language, you have the option of English subtitles. We also recommend his talk at the Beyond Growth conference: “How to finance welfare without growth?” He has also been interviewed on the Steady Stater Podcast. Otherwise, check out Timothée Parrique’s website here.

PGAP has been delighted and humbled by the fantastic listener support that we received for our last episode with First Nations cultural educator Larry Blight. Thank you to everyone who took the time share your kind words with us. In keeping with Degrowth values, PGAP does not use advertising and so depends on a supportive and generous community to get the word out. Please help us spread the good word by sharing this and other episodes of PGAP with your friends, family and networks. We encourage you to review and rate PGAP on Apple Podcast or your favourite platform. You are welcome to contact us anytime with your thoughts, feedback and suggestions.

All views and perspectives of PGAP guests, including all past or present legacies, remain independent of the perspectives and legacies of PGAP and Sustainable Population Australia, who support this podcast. For a more in-depth look into some of the issues around discussing population, which were touched on during the outro of this episode, please read our blog post: “To populate or not to populate? How we can come together around the eternal debate of everyone’s favourite vexed issue.”

Until next time, until then!