He looks like a 70-year-old former professor from the Université de Paris Sud. But the grizzled economist is one of Europe’s leading critics of economic growth and consumerism. Serge Latouche was a late convert to the anti-growth debate. It wasn’t until 2001 that he spoke for the first time at a UNESCO conference in Paris of ‘de-growth’, calling for selective economic contraction to stop environmental decay, using the French word – décroissance.
‘The English translation, “de-growth”, pleased most of the audience, so I stuck with it,’ Latouche recalls. ‘But I would rather speak of “a-growth”, much like we speak of “a-theism”.
