Frugality as a choice vs. frugality as a social condition. Is de-growth doomed to be a Eurocentric project?

摘要

I argue that the degrowth movement reflects the values of a particular social group, namely the well-educated European middle class that share progressive-green cosmopolitan values. This feature creates significant barriers for its dissemination among lower-income social groups in other parts of the world. There is an important difference between frugality as a choice and frugality as a social condition. In order to elaborate on this, I challenge a couple of theses put forward in the degrowth literature.