A cityscape of Manchester at night.

Tepid degrowth vs sustainable abundance.

Tom Forth, .

Yorkshire's economy has not grown in twenty years.

Yorkshire's economy has not grown in twenty years. Average wages have not grown, nor have wages for the highly paid. Small increases in low wages have now mostly been eaten up by Covid, Brexit, and the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our best guess, from a decade ago, is that income inequality in Yorkshire is as low as Sweden and the Netherlands. It may even be lower today. Yorkshire's regional inequality as part of North England is lower than even the most equal countries in Europe. There are prosperous parts of Yorkshire such as Ilkley, Harrogate, and Beverley but they are small and vast majority of people live in places with incomes well below the national average and economies much weaker than the national average.

We make extremely good use of what resources we have; our roads, our hospitals, our schools, our homes, our buses, and our trains are generally full. We have close to zero unemployment and run our public services at well over 100% of capacity. Short notice train cancellations and care visit cancellations due to lack of staff are common and weekday GP appointments are rationed by how quickly you can call after appointments become available at 8am. Waiting times for basic healthcare procedures and mental health referrals are longer than ever.

From Leeds (0.8%, 1 in 125) to Hull (1.5%, 1 in 65) almost no homes are empty for longer than six months, a figure we've cut by two thirds in the last two decades mostly by restricting the construction of new homes.

While our economy has not grown, we have reduced our carbon dioxide emissions. Drax power station is still a huge emitter of carbon dioxide by burning imported wood pellets, but we have closed all of our coal mines and all of our coal power stations. Our heavy industry and its associated pollution is largely gone. I write this from new flats in Leeds City Centre on what was a century ago one of the world's largest centres of textile and railway manufacturing. The nearest large industries are Asda and the head office of GHD hair straighteners. In many more places than Leeds we have replaced polluting industries with clean ones. For example, the emergence of Hull as a European centre of the offshore wind power industry is a huge asset to our region.

Yorkshire sounds like what advocates of 'degrowth' want, although I'm sure that they would want us to move much faster.

I'm much less convinced that we're moving the right direction. After two decades of tepid degrowth, I think we can do much better.

The alternative to tepid degrowth.

In books such as Doughnut Economics, degrowth is oftened defined more clearly in opposition to what exists today than positively in its own terms. The unleashed libertarian capitalism that is claimed to be our current economic model is portrayed as a system with no restraints, no solidarity, and no consideration of externalities. I know no-one promotes such a vision of our society, and I find these books at best incorrect and at worst unkind in their assertion that we currently live in such a world.

Degrowthers and I disagree on where we are now, but we can at least agree that what we are doing now is bad and that unleashed libertarian capitalism is not a good model for society.

So what alternative to the tepid degrowth economy that we find ourselves in today would I propose for Yorkshire? As a first try, I'll call it sustainable abundance.

But first, why Yorkshire? The obvious reason is that I live here and grew up here and I can give real examples and be reasonably confident that most people who reply "it's more complicated than that" in objection are wrong. The more important reason is that Yorkshire is a weak economy within Europe with good universities, large cities, and all the benefits of UK sound government and English law. If you're thinking "well, sound government before Boris Johnson and Brexit" then I urge you to take this more seriously. The weak economy part means that questions about how well we can measure improvements in our economy given the rapid improvement of technology and free online services are unimportant. This may or may not be a real problem, but Yorkshire has a 65% GDP/capita gap to make up to the Netherlands so we know that we can measure GDP properly for at least two decades of rapid growth ahead of us. The good universities, large cities, and functional government and rule of law part is important because while development economics has no clear plan on how to cultivate strong economies in rural areas without the rule of law, there is general agreement that success has a strong foundation with what we have in Yorkshire.

So now, to keep the next section under 5000 words, I'll cheekily switch to just West Yorkshire and ask, what might sustainable abundance look like in West Yorkshire?

Sustainable abundance and how to achieve it in West Yorkshire.

We'll start with three guiding rules,

  1. Avoid asking the UK government for money without a plan to pay it back. We don't elect the UK government. The majority of Yorkshire MPs are Labour, but the UK government is Tory. And the Tories generally don't like being asked for loads of money without a plan for getting it back. We need to work with that.
  2. Burn less stuff. Burning stuff is generally dumb. You just bought something and now you're burning it and destroying the planet. Bad idea and bad for GDP growth.
  3. Do more with the same number of people. Unemployment is almost zero in Yorkshire, and we don't control immigration, so we don't need to 'create jobs'. We need to make existing jobs more productive, which is good for GDP growth.

And now some specific things to do,

 

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