Discussion
A response to Burn Murdoch's highly flawed Financial Times article: The shrinking arguments against degrowth –
By the ever reliable @timparrique
https://timotheeparrique.com/a-response-to-the-financial-times-the-shrinking-arguments-against-degrowth/
#degrowth #JournalisticStandards #decoupling
@timparrique "Across all five claims, the pattern repeats: Burn-Murdoch reaches for a congenial source, drops its caveats, and presents his selective interpretation as settled science. Coming from the Financial Times’s chief data reporter, that’s genuinely concerning. These cheap-shot tribunes, which bundle a handful of hyperlinks into a bombastic claim, are dangerously close to misinformation."
@timparrique
"A column like this takes minutes to read, hours to write, but days to fact-check against the literature. I’m aware that this is a losing battle for scientists, who will always run out of time first. My hope is that this debunking sharpens readers’ critical instincts and helps them see that a handful of old papers and posts, dressed up with one’s own columns, cannot overturn the well-documented findings of an entire field."
Someone at the Financial Times is taking degrowth seriously enough as a threat to get a piece published attempting to debunk it. In a weird way, that could be taken as a sign of progress. As the old Ghandian saying goes; first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. The FT hacks aren't ignoring or laughing at us, are they.
@strypey @timparrique
Certainly there seems to be a growth of these pieces.
We demolished a Guardian one in December.
https://degrowthuk.org/2025/12/16/decoupling-again/
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