Slow Down or Die w/ Timothée Parrique
Upstream
Upstream
4.9 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2025
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Timothée Parrique joins us for a discussion on degrowth. We begin the conversation with explaining the concept of degrowth, looking at its history, and really unpacking what it is and what it isn't. We talk about degrowth's two-fold agenda to both downscale production and consumption for environmental reasons, as well as its potential for removing the profit-motive as a central concern in how we organize society. We outline the differences between degrowth and recessions, the problem with GDP as a measurement tool for success, how degrowth can help to reduce poverty in certain contexts, the benefits of a dynamic steady state economy, where the degrowth movement is today, and much more.
Timothée Parrique is an economist originally from Versailles, France. He is currently a researcher at HEC Lausanne – The Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He works on macro-ecological planning in Switzerland as part of the STRIVE research project. He's also the author of Slow Down or Die: The Economics of Degrowth.
Further resources:
- Timothée Parrique
- Slow Down or Die: The Economics of Degrowth, by Timothée Parrique
- The Limits to Growth
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Intermission music: "Atlas" by Muma
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Every time I would pronounce degrowth, you know, you would see them like hissing, like a pack of velociraptors, you know, like ready to... |
| 0:27.6 | I was like, what is that guy saying? |
| 0:30.1 | You know, it just... it disturbs me. |
| 0:32.1 | Like, many people have come to me after my thesis was published, and they were like, it looks solid and I've not managed to demonstrate |
| 0:38.3 | that you're wrong but I want to. See, there's an emotional response and that's good. Because |
| 0:43.8 | a critical concept is here to criticize. It's here to somehow unveil an aspect of a reality |
| 0:50.7 | that we've been normalizing. And I think the pursuit of economic growth at different |
| 0:55.2 | levels, at the individual level, at the level of a country, of course, that want to increase |
| 1:00.5 | the GDP, at the level of a company of a business that always wants to increase its profit. |
| 1:06.1 | These kind of ideology of growth we've been normalizing over the last decades. And so this, the concept of |
| 1:12.8 | degrowth, I think, came at the right time to problematize this. You're listening to Upstream. |
| 1:19.3 | Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to |
| 1:25.9 | unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around |
| 1:29.2 | you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Endless growth is not only impossible on a finite planet, |
| 1:36.8 | but it's antagonistic to human and planetary health and well-being. Of course, some economic growth |
| 1:43.2 | may be needed globally, particularly in global |
| 1:46.4 | South states, which have been chronically and criminally underdeveloped by the West. But for |
| 1:51.9 | the majority of the global North, degrowth is not just desirable. It's a necessity. And in fact, |
| 1:59.2 | according to today's guest, we must slow down or die. |
| 2:05.0 | Today, we'll be joined by Timote Parique, an economist originally from Versailles, France. |
| 2:11.2 | He is currently a researcher at the H.E.C. Lausanne, the faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. |
| 2:20.3 | He works on macro-ecological planning in Switzerland as part of the Strive Research Project. |
... |
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