In defense of the washing machine

I write reasonably often about degrowth, the movement to save the world by shrinking the economy. Why? After all, it’s an extremely niche ideology, one basically confined to European socialist academics, with absolutely no chance of ever becoming law or policy anywhere. Is it even worth continuing to rebut? 

I think so, and the reason is that while the actual proposals of degrowthers are unserious, laughable, and stand no chance at becoming law, the underlying antigrowth attitude is far more widely held — and that attitude does shape our policy priorities. I often get replies to this newsletter pushing back on our degrowth skepticism, repeating the line “we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet” or similar ones. 

So the degrowth conversation isn’t so easily dodged and is worth having.

Much ado about washing machines

The most recent round of degrowth arguments was kicked off by a Dutch PhD candidate who wrote that we shouldn’t have washing machines — yes, washing machines. 

“Washing clothes by hand is a chore, oftentimes a lonely one. But it needn’t be. We could have communal washing facilities in each neighborhood where people can plan to come in groups to do their laundry together,” he proposed on Twitter. “Washing clothes by hand is also tiring work if you have a load, but it’s still physical activity & exercise. We spend time in the gym & running outside to keep fit; would it be so bad to devote some of that time & energy to washing clothes by hand?”

The take caught fire because it captures so much of what animates the modern degrowth movement: ignorance about the realities of life, and absurd priorities. Doing laundry by hand is exhausting, miserable, deeply unpleasant work which has absorbed much of women’s time for as long as we’ve worn clothes. Comparing the backbreaking work of scrubbing all clothes by hand every week to going to the gym is fundamentally unserious. Dozens of historians of women’s labor jumped in to try to explain just how bad doing laundry by hand was and all the reasons a washing machine represents a big leap forward in quality of life, freedom, and human well-being. 

The other thing that makes this opinion so absurd is that washing machines are not actually a significant contributor to any of the environmental problems degrowthers claim to care about. It costs only a few dollars to run your washing machine for the full year. We’ve dramatically improved them since the 1980s — they’re 50 percent larger and use about a quarter as much water and electricity.

The proposal to scrub all your clothes by hand is a proposal to replace fairly low-energy machine work with a part-time job’s worth of unpaid miserable labor for approximately no real environmental benefit.

More reasonable degrowthers often focus on worries about short device lifespans and ask that devices be long-lasting and easy to repair — but it’s an intellectual subculture in which you can always win attention by having the most radical opinion, which is how we ended up arguing over whether everyone should scrub their clothes by hand. 

Why the washing machine debate matters

One of my takeaways when I delved deeply into the degrowth movement was that it was substantially a lifestyle fantasy masquerading as a political movement. People drawn to it find something appealing about an imagined past where people did work by hand and were in touch with the land. So they propose policies that meet this aesthetic criteria, with no consideration at all for whether this improves the environment in any way let alone whether it’s a good tradeoff. 

There’s nothing wrong with personally choosing an anti-consumerist life. But there is something wrong with dramatically lowering the quality of life for everyone else without any real benefits.

But one good thing came of the washing machines discourse — an opportunity to be reminded of how much better the world is than it used to be, and how much heartbreaking, backbreaking labor our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did that we can now appreciate being free of. 

For the washing machine in particular, there’s a famous TED talk by the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling, which amounts to a beautiful articulation of how much good this humble appliance brought the world:

I was only 4 years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine. And the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. And Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood, and she had handwashed laundry for seven children. And now she was going to watch electricity do that work.

My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this. And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, “No, no, no, no. Let me, let me push the button.” And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, “Oh, fantastic. I want to see this. Give me a chair. Give me a chair. I want to see it.” And she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program. She was mesmerized. To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.

… If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them.

And what’s the magic with them? My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, “Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” Because this is the magic: You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me.

My favorite part about Rosling’s speech is his reminder to his audience that people want laundry machines very badly and will vote for them. The UN estimates that only two billion people have washing machines; for the other six billion, a life of washing clothes by hand is not a relic of the distant past but an exhausting chore that consumes a significant fraction of women’s time and energy worldwide. 

And that’s ultimately why I don’t want to leave the washing machine discourse alone. “Should, or should not, human beings have access to labor-saving technologies?” is not a hypothetical question. It doesn’t just get written up in PhD theses. It isn’t just for Twitter dunks.

As you read this, billions of people still don’t have washing machines, nor access to the electricity to run them. But we can make political choices — about how we encourage the development of cheaper and better technologies, about how we support basic electrical infrastructure, about which inventions we consider a societal priority — which can change that. 

In this week’s UN General Assembly, the international body is deciding what to do about the slowdown of improvements for the global poor. If we think of washing machines as a silly modern luxury, our policy will reflect that. If we think of them as a powerful tool of women’s liberation, our policy will reflect that. 

Degrowthers are toothless, in that their advocacy will absolutely never lead to an end to washing machines in the rich world. But our ambivalence toward material improvements in standards of living is not toothless, because those improvements in standards of living are desperately needed, and we have to decide as a policy community if we’re willing to prioritize them or not.