Degrowth economics?

I cannot empirically demonstrate this whole idea (I'll try it, though, with some examples in successive posts) but a lot of signals lead me to think that we, developed societies in developed countries, live well over our possibilities. And certainly, if every citizen in the world were supposed to enjoy the same level of consumption we enjoy in the first world, I do think the planet could not handle with such pressure. Last Easter I came across a short article appearing in a national newspaper talking about a new radical growth theory called Degrowth Economics. An interview (in Spanish) with the creator can be found here.

More or less this field of study argues "for the need to deconstruct the current development debate, which he views as an unsustainable result of westernization. In order to truly develop, poor countries must break from the path of mental, cultural and economic dependency the so-called “developed countries” want to impose."

Something similar happened to us when we went to Bolivia to talk about the necessity to fight against cronyism in the national economy and tried to show the good things about markets (with strong states, of course!). Congressmen from the political party of Evo Morales -MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo)- were reluctant to accept our vision of the markets... indigenous had very different metal models to accept some of the basis of markets. Something similar happens with Islam and the predominant (western) views of what a good market looks like.

All of this came to my mind because I receive the interesting newsletter from New Economics Foundation explaining how they have tried to established the day when Britain's national level of consumption would start to go beyond their environmental means. According to them it was last 15th of April. Here you can download the whole report.