Language is Important

You need it to communicate ideas … so learn how to do it well.

It’s just one little word. How hard can it to be to communicate the ideas behind it?

As anyone inclined to talk about degrowth out loud in the world knows; what you say, how you say it, when you say it and who you say it to are all important. More and more degrowth conversations are happening every day, so we need to talk about how to talk about degrowth.

Degrowth is a word with relatively low public recognition, though that is changing.

The above graphic shows data from the Google Ngram viewer, which shows the frequency of words or phrases in books over time. You can see here that degrowth has surpassed green growth in mentions. But if you zoom out and compare degrowth to “sustainability”, you can still see a wide chasm between degrowth and more mainstream ideas such as sustainability.

Consider that the pendulum is currently swinging against sustainability in the investor, political and corporate worlds, and you can see how small the penetration of degrowth is in the collective zeitgeist.

This isn’t meant to discourage people, but to demonstrate that what has been climbed thus far is just a hill, with a mountain ahead of us.

Degrowth may not have entered the mainstream enough for it to have spawned a degrowth dance on ticktock (if I am mistaken about this, please tell me … I need to see that), but degrowth does currently have the wind at its back. It isn’t a gale-force wind yet, but it is a wind, nonetheless.

How to talk about degrowth?

Degrowth is new to most people. Maybe not the people here, but to the population at large it is still a new word, a new concept. I’ve been writing this blog for nearly two years, and I’ll likely pass 2,000 subscribers later this month. I’m happy with those numbers, but suffer under no illusion that my blog (or any other degrowth blog) will hit the Substack best-sellers list anytime soon.

Nonetheless, how we talk about degrowth is important. This is not a scientific breakdown, but over that last few years, I’ve taken “degrowth” out for a test drive among an unsuspecting public made up of friends, family, my professional network and other parents of my kids friends. I’ve found that about a third of people think I’m crazy, or a communist. About a third of people are already on board - even if they haven’t heard the term “degrowth" before. While, the final third don’t know much at all about the conversation, but are willing to listen.

Don’t scare the “normies”.

There is a great phrase I’ve heard applied to politics, that I’m sure applies to most endeavors:
“Don’t scare the normies.”

This simply means don’t come in with ideas, or language that is so far away from most people's everyday experience that they are going to shut you down, tune you out, or report you to the authorities before you can even begin discussing UBI and the right to repair.

That one-third that doesn’t really know what degrowth is but are open to the conversation are the “normies” in this scenario. They are your average citizen, who might be a little bit informed, but is mostly trying to do their job, put food on the table, raise their kids and maybe be a positive impact in their community. Décroissance is not in their vocabulary. Don’t open with that, and certainly not in a French accent.

When talking to people about degrowth, try to bring it to their front door. In our recent paper at Arketa Institute, we started with Neo Classical Economics, Ecological Economics and Planetary Boundaries because our audience was largely financial professionals. Those topics led directly into degrowth in the story we told.

But each audience is different. If I’m talking to a group of university students, my tone is different than if I am talking to a pension fund, or a board of directors, or another parent at my son's soccer practice.

Know your audience, and if possible, let them start the conversation. If they are curious, let them question you. A conversation is always a better way to engage people than a sermon. So have more conversations than you give speeches.

Choose your words carefully.

The word “deleterious” is one of my favorite words. It simply means, “causing harm or damage”. It’s a word for showing off, not really a word for communicating. Yes, many people probably know what it means, but saying “causing harm” or “damage” will get my point across to more people over the long run. I ran a quick search, and I’ve used “deleterious” in 4 essays previously over the nearly two years I’ve been writing this blog. That’s too many. Now it’s 5. I’m going to have to swear off deleterious for the next year.

I was on a call about a month ago in which a lot of sustainability people participated. About halfway through the meeting, one of the presenters on this large Zoom call used the phrase “more than human”. When he said this, it jolted me. I had never heard that phrase before. It only took me a second to figure out from the context that he was referring to “animals”, but I probably visibly winced on camera at that time, because I knew he had just lost some of the normies on the call.

If you want people to listen to you, and you want them to engage in a conversation where they expect you to listen to them, you have to meet them where they live.

No one thinks of the deleterious effects to more than humans in their community. They think of damage to animals. If you say the former, you are telling people that you think you are smarter than them, or that you are insecure and overcompensating. If you say the latter, they will probably keep talking with you. Say the latter.

Know your basic definitions, but don’t treat them as reverent objects.

Language can divide - so know what you are talking about and communicate it clearly and succinctly and don’t assume your message was heard the way you wanted it to be heard. Ask people their thoughts at the outset and try not to talk more than the other person in the conversation if you can help it. A good conversation is like tennis. If it is only one person hitting the ball all the time, the person you are playing with will likely lose interest.

Terms like degrowth, post-growth, a-growth, doughnut economics and wellbeing economy, are often used interchangeably, but they mean different things. Know the differences between them but don’t be pedantic (I’m sorry punctilious, I’m sorry exacting).

Know that degrowth is a path that can get you to a post-growth economy, that a-growth is agnostic to growth, that doughnut economics isn’t necessarily an economic system but a visual way to represent how a system does or does not provide for life’s necessities while staying within planetary boundaries, and that a wellbeing economy is an insanely broad concept that you get credit for knowing that it puts human needs ahead of profit maximization.

When using language to communicate degrowth, don’t be too punctilious, be a human being having a conversation with another human being. Start there. I believe that because degrowth is an idea whose time has come, you will have more and more people to listen to you with each passing day.