Degrowth and the Growth Trap

A household that cannot cover a fixed cost out of a bad year is in a growth trap, and the trap closes by growing. A loan on land is a claim on every future harvest. A machine is a bill that arrives whether or not the season cooperates. None of that is caused by greed. It is what a fixed cost does to a variable income, and the response is usually to sell more of something, which means more ground or more certainty sold to other people.

Two things are not claimed here. Growth is not impossible everywhere, and collapse does not arrive on a date. The claim is narrower and checkable: the arithmetic at household scale does not reward growth, and a household already inside the trap cannot farm its way out. Lesson 405 writes the stopping rule and this lesson is the arithmetic under it.

Output and energy move together

Steve Keen's work on production functions is the clearest published account of why growth is an energy claim rather than a spending decision. Neoclassical models that include energy at all weight it at an exponent of 0.03 to 0.04, roughly energy's share of GDP, and on that coefficient a ten per cent fall in energy supply costs about 0.4 per cent of output. Keen's reading of the aggregate data is that the relation between energy and output is close to one to one, which makes the same fall cost about ten per cent. The two figures differ by a factor of twenty five, and the gap decides whether an energy constraint is a rounding error or the main event.

His sentence about the physical reality underneath is the one to keep: "labour without energy is a corpse, while capital without energy is a sculpture." Energy is an input to labour and to capital, and a machine with no fuel is an object in a shed. That is why expansion is a purchase of energy demand. Every new machine, pump and cold store adds a standing claim on fuel that has to be met in the years the harvest is thin.

The stock, where the decoupling claim lands

A claim about decoupling is a claim about stocks, and stocks can be counted. The vault's assessment of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's history of energy works the global primary energy series. In 2025 fossil fuels supplied 143,806 of 177,865 terawatt hours, or 80.85 per cent of primary energy, and coal, oil and gas each reached their all-time maximum that year.

The additions decide the question. From 2010 to 2025 fossil fuels added 22,041 terawatt hours and solar and wind together added 5,145, so fossil growth ran at 4.3 times the renewables and the absolute gap widened by 16,896 terawatt hours. The ratio of new solar and wind to new fossil has risen from 0.08 in 2018 to 0.25 in 2022 and 0.66 in 2025. Rising, and not yet one, which means new supply has so far expanded total consumption instead of displacing the old.

The counter-case, stated properly

The strongest objection is that this reads the stock and ignores the rate, and it is serious. Solar and wind together grew 19.5 per cent a year from 2010 to 2025, and solar alone at 34.2 per cent, with annual solar growth running between 21 and 35 per cent every year from 2015 to 2025 and no sustained decay. A logistics curve bends and this one has not started. On constant rates solar and wind reach fossil parity in 2045.

That extrapolation dies on resources, because parity at those rates implies about 26 times today's installed fleet and land of the order of 1.6 times France. Those figures are order-of-magnitude estimates rather than sourced values, and the parity year is itself a constant-rate extrapolation, so it is used here to show the curve must bend and not as a forecast. Neither the claim that the transition cannot happen nor the claim that growth can run forever survives that test. Less energy throughput arrives on the successful path as well as the failed one.

Why a household cannot grow out of it

Chayanov's account of the peasant household supplies the stopping rule. The household produces for use, and its labour is set by the balance between what the family needs and how the work wears on the people doing it. Past that balance the marginal hour is not paid for in food that gets eaten. The household carries no growth imperative, and it has no growth escape from a fixed cost either.

The physical reason is the worst acre in the field. A holding expands outward into land that is steeper, wetter or further from the barn, and those acres return less per hour than the ground already under the spade, so the average return falls as the farm grows. The one route that genuinely scales is selling certainty about growing food, which is the mechanism lesson 406 names.

What degrowth would require, at this scale

Degrowth is a target for a household here, not a program for a state, because a household cannot set aggregate targets and does not need permission to stop. Four moves with numbers on them. Write the number sheet of lesson 405 and check it in February, pounds in the store against pounds eaten. Hold income to the surplus, so a failed harvest fails the income rather than the loan. Shorten the working year: the World Inequality Lab's Global Justice Report of 2026 models ninety per cent of humanity doubling income by 2100 while working about 1,000 hours a year instead of 2,100, with income compressed to one to five and wealth to one to ten. Cut energy throughput at the household rather than buying into a supply transition, where sufficiency scenarios in Energy Strategy Reviews in 2026 find 40 to 60 per cent lower demand than conventional scenarios. That last figure is reported from the citation in this vault rather than read in the paper, because the publisher blocks the download, and it is flagged for that reason.

The program is not finished

Jason Hickel is the writer most associated with this argument, and the farm has its own page on him at Degrowth, which is where the site's position on where his case holds and where it does not is written out. He is not cited with a figure in this lesson, and that is deliberate: no work of his is in this course's source library, and this course does not quote numbers out of secondary summaries.

A systematic review describes degrowth research as "largely normative opinions rather than analysis," with most proposals "lacking precision, depth and concrete policy design" and rarely using quantitative data. Critics add that far-reaching degrowth scenarios are projected to increase extreme poverty, with no precedent of the poorest benefiting inside a shrinking economy. Both are correct about the state of the work. This course does not have the state-level version and does not claim to.