The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy | Hacker News Reader

The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy

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83 pointsazemda104 comments

You can ridicule the specifics, but the high-level idea here is spot on. Either you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources, or you have to find a way to have a stable society without economic growth. I see no reason to think the former is possible, so that leaves the latter. The alternative is some kind of calamity.

> you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources

Hasn't technology generally been heading in this direction? It seems we are constantly doing more with less. If it keeps up, and we slowdown procreation, I see no reason why it won't drive resource usage down long term.

I mean, I completely disagree with the premise that we must consume non-renewable resources to generate wealth, but assuming it is true I think we've come a long way in changing that and the future looks even better.

You can only increase efficiency so far. I do agree that a reduction in population would result in lower resource usage, but that's an economic slowdown, i.e. the opposite of growth.

Isn't economic retraction the opposite of economic growth?

You're right, that's what I meant to say.

> Hasn't technology generally been heading in this direction? It seems we are constantly doing more with less

Actually no, we haven't and we don't. Carbon emissions are still growing.

Classic mistake: You're confusing relative and absolute reductions. We have reduced relative ecological impact a lot, but overall impact has been growing along the way.

This is also called Jevon’s paradox:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Today I learned!

Pedantic corrections:

- It's the Jevons Paradox (not Jevon's), named after William Stanley Jevons

- non-mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Carbon emissions are decreasing in Europe despite economic growth. Nature is getting in better shape as well.

Can you explain how nature is getting in better shape? Everything I have read contradicts your statement.

There's more forest in Europe now than a hundred years ago.

Well, Europe (and US) also outsourced most of their dirties industries to China...

One way technology can really decrease consumption is by turning humans to machines. If you are essentially a CPU, your energy consumption would likely be very low yet your computational power and lifespan could be much higher. This way earth could support a much higher quantity of "humans", being mostly electric, it could even leave the confinements of earth, this way freeing earth.

The only challenge left is to maintain cognitive growth drives when you're based on electricity, rather than hormones among other chemicals.

This is only viable if you're willing to sacrifice the biosphere in the process.

> the high-level idea here is spot on. Either you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources, or you have to find a way to have a stable society without economic growth

That's just a narrow-minded false dilemma. There's a (for all practical purposes) infinite universe out there, we have plenty of resources to grow even if we stop recycling.

Aside from the practicality of expanding fast enough (Dyson sphere around the sun in about 1400 years, needing to leave the galaxy in 2400 years), how far can you feasibly bring resources back to earth from to fuel that growth here? If you can't do that at some point, you have to stop growing locally even if the species is expanding. And besides, without FTL travel we're not going to be colonizing anything, just spreading seeds of new societies and, eventually, species that happen to be our offspring.

The rate of growth matters too : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20045380

Attempted mass colonization of the moon and mars might cause massive economic growth with less consumer consumption ?

That could kick the can down the road a bit, yes.

The economic value of a healthy environment is certainly not accounted for, but growth isn't bad. Externalities and tragedy of the commons are.

I want the economy to grow. Specifically I want the wind and solar industries to grow REALLY fast. So much so that their lobbying power is greater than that of the oil industry.

>So much so that their lobbying power is greater than that of the oil industry. I've noticed a bit of this from the anti-renewables crowd. They accuse green energy proponents of just wanting to increase the value of their investments. Somehow they ignore the huge investment in fossil fuels though.

For a while, I was pretty sold on anarcho-primitivism as a concept (Derrick Jensen is a prominent figure in that sphere), but it is pretty deluded to think that quality of life would increase and life would be cushy and comfortable.

The question is: if we do nothing and just keep destroying the planet, would it be worse? Or better?

> keep destroying the planet,

We couldn't even scratch the planet with an all-out nuclear war, why do people always resort to such ridiculous hyperbole? The planet will be fine, we just might destroy our species (very unlikely with pollution etc.).

You're fighting semantics here, that's exactly what they were referring to.

What improvements in quality of life do we really _need_ though?

In first world countries we're so comfy and everything is so convenient that the leading causes of death are due to eating too much and not moving enough. That's pretty ironic if you ask me.

We don't have to go back to living in caves and eating raw animals of course. But I don't see how slowing down would decrease our quality of life.

There is no limit in artificial quality of life improvement. You can spend 1 month of your salary on a bread toaster or on a few iot light bulbs... Or you can send it to a private pension and retire x months earlier than the legal age.

Maybe not working 40 hours a week and enjoying the world in our prime age?

We spend our best time of the day stuck in an office or someone else's property doing work for them. Losing all the time we have with sunlight.

If we all worked 20 hours a week and maintained our SoL we would even be mentally more stable.

And then the people whose SoL is terrible right now would outcompete you and your SoL will fall, because they're the better candidate for the job. There are a lot of people whose standard of living is low right now.

Maybe we shouldn't tie SoL to "work output"

It is more about spreading the wealth to the people who actually need it instead of focusing on consumerist nonsense in a first world bubble

It's worth noting that degrowth is not anarcho-primitivism, or for that matter any variant of primitivism.

An author once came and spoke to my environmental studies class. Of the Club of Rome, he said "Fascinating ideas. They might be right. But try getting elected by promising a shrinking economy."

Yeah, not gonna happen. Best to treat growth as a given and work around it, imho.

> "Fascinating ideas. They might be right. But try getting elected by promising a shrinking economy."

It sounds like the problem is democracy. What we need is a BDFL.

Pol Pot for dictator!

We need to get rid of the literate classes... Like the guy reading this... And the guy wr-

The world only offers DFLs.

It could work if the promise was to give people time instead of a 9 to 5 shitty job, and assuring equality through a Universal Basic Income. That income could be financed with taxes on externalities. Taxing externalities would also benefit the local and more sustainable economy with more decent jobs.

Maybe this would work in the future, but probably not in our lifetime. Paying $12k a year to every American would already cost about as much (more?) as the US collects in taxes.

Because a UBI is cash, the accounting is a little weird. If you pay $10k "more" in taxes but then receive a $12k UBI, has this cost you money?

Outside of some nominal administrative cost in cutting the checks it doesn't "cost" anything on net, it just moves money around. Of course, the above-median person paying $14k in taxes but only receiving $12k back has lost $2k on a personal level, and that's really the cost to be calculated -- the reduction in incentive caused by the tax.

But if you use the model where the UBI replaces existing social assistance programs, marginal tax rates wouldn't be that different than they are now, and the marginal rates on lower income people would be lower when you account for the marginal losses they currently suffer to phase outs of existing means-tested benefits.

Would be great, but human nature is to want more stuff, money and power.

On the upside, many "new" sectors don't use natural resources, except human time. E.g. writing blog posts, social media management, doing marketing campaigns for Gucci. Growth in those sectors should be (mostly) easy on the planet.

Except aren't a lot the jobs you described usually trying to sell products that aren't necessarily good for the planet?

Exactly this. Without stuff to sell, those "industries" wouldn't really exist. If your blog relies on ad revenue and you have nothing to advertise you're not making money. Gucci doesn't need to advertise if there's no competition to Gucci.

On the other hand nobody is going to die because society decided it no longer needed Gucci. There is a strong argument we would be better off without them.

You remove enough luxury products and people won't have jobs though.

> Would be great, but human nature is to want more stuff, money and power.

A lot of HN lives in an upper-middle class first world bubble. Median global income is $2900 per year. That's less than $10 a day.

For the vast majority of the world, economic growth isn't about "stuff, money and power". It's about escaping abject poverty. It's about reliable access to running water, electricity, shelter, and food.

Source? Last time I've checked global median income was closer to $365/year...

EDIT : Never mind, I must have confused it with the poverty line, and an old one to boot !

EDIT2 : Note though, that the costs of living, and especially of housing, are going to be wildly different depending on your location !

>Would be great, but human nature is to want more stuff, money and power.

I wonder to what extent this is a feature of capitalism (or class society in general) rather than human nature.

This idea is a kind of calamity. They’re proposing to increase poverty worldwide when we haven’t even managed to get everybody over $2 a day of consumption, or bring child mortality down to rates that would have been acceptable in the US in 1950.

Like I said, the specifics are certainly open to ridicule. But I don't think you can dismiss the idea that we need to find a way to live without economic growth. I think we still have room for some growth, but not for long. If we keep to the status quo, waste heat from energy production alone will grow to disastrous levels within a few centuries.

The world's population is still growing, economy must grow or there is less of everything for everyone.

Aren't we past the point of having too much? Making plastic single use goods obsolete and reducing all the Amazon purchases that get used once if ever would reduce total output. More focus could be put on quality (I know this can't be defined) products, rather that just driving blind consumerism.

Banning single use plastic is not a bad idea. That's pretty easy to enforce against the chain stores.

I wonder how it would affect garbage collection bills.

This is very un-evenly distributed growth however. Developed nations are at or below sustenance level birth rates and largely rely on immigration to break even. As countries develop, birth rates decline -- this is well documented and incredibly striking. Check out this graph of birth rate vs. HDI [1]. As the rest of the world develops, the curve will invert and turn negative, it's just a matter of time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#/media/Fi...

Population growth is not a constant in the equation.

That doesn't necessarily need to be so. Developed economies often end up with below-replacement birthrates (see japan-- it's the direction the western world is headed)

The universe, heck even the solar system, is pretty big...

At e.g. 2.3% yearly growth in energy usage, humanity would use the sun's entire output in roughly 1400 years time and the entire galaxy's energy output in about 2400 years.[1]

I'm all for space exploration and colonization, but I'm sceptical it can solve the growth problem. I mean, what happens on Earth?

Edit: 1: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Fair enough. That's quicker than I would have guessed, but exponentials are pretty powerful.

If the growth is 1%, then we are good for ~3000 years, even in just our solar system. A tenth of a percent would give us ~30k years in the solar system.

Although, very very low growth would last quite some time on the galactic scale. A hundredth of a percent would give us more than 500k years to reach galactic energy levels. Which may actually be realistic given the difficulties of interstellar travel and cosmic scale engineering.

But yes, it seems that in the next few tens of thousands of years, barring an Earth-shattering revolution in our understanding of energy, we will likely have to learn to live in something much closer to a steady-state system, at least in this solar system.

And even such a paradigm shift would just push out the deadline. But I do think such nitty gritty details of when and how the ceiling is hit will effect how things play out.

No they aren’t.

By the way child mortality in the US is the worst in the OECD despite its wealth.

I'm pretty far on the left and used to be active in communist politics (little bit less exceptional here in Europe than across the pond), but I've always been very irritated by these degrowth movements, although a lot of this stuff came out of 'my' political tent.

It's to me reminiscent of the 'deep ecology' folks, who don't pursue environmentalism with the goal of furthering human well-being, but have a quasi religious attitude to nature as if it is a thing in itself. If you want to have a life of leisure and cooperation, you need material progress and abstract away all the nasty and brutish things which is only achievable in an environment of abundance.

Degrowth will produce the exact opposite. Scarcity, tribalism, zero-sum competition and so on.

Degrowth has never been in the same "political tent" as "communism" (by which I assume you mean Marx/Engels-based socialism?)

The idea that human well-being is central, while nature is just a resource used to achieve abundance is completely opposite to the philosophy of the degrowth movement.

Then almost by definition the movement prioritizes an anthropomorphized planet over people. The movement, in effect, advocates for killing people.

That's like equating people critical of Israel with those in favor of reopening Auschwitz.

If it's not in the same political camp then why does the article say that we need to redistribute our resources before we can even start with degrowth? They're basically asking for the same thing communists are asking for.

Where ? I see "before", not "after". > This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.

And equating redistribution with communism is silly - top income tax rates in the US were the highest - around 80%-90% during MacCarthyism !

> Families would perhaps have one car instead of three

That's cute. No, most families would own NO cars, like most families don't own an helicopter these days.

P.S.: I'm pretty sure that's already/still true today, if you consider the world rather than the richest countries.

P.P.S: And I'm pretty sure that it's only in USA that the idea of most families having three cars wouldn't be considered outrageous.

What size ‘should’ the global economy be?

The size that ensures every person a comfortable lifestyle while maintaining a healthy and sustainable biosphere.

Is the human species every really comfortable?

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Blaine Pascal

Haha well at least we can make people more materially comfortable so they can focus on their spiritual, social, and existential discomfort.

Less than 1.6 Earths would be a good start.

https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/ecologi...

Jeffrey Sachs[1] put forward $10,000 USD per person as a sustainable sized economy. For most in the world this would be a massive improvement. It was a few years ago now, thanks to our inaction it’s probably lower now.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs

I'm amazed it's such a sensitive topic. Some people are litterally angry in the comments out people suggesting degrowth.

Since we have math lovers here, I'll post a fantastic math oriented conf on the topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=list_othe...

It is elites a way of saying that most working class is becoming disposable for the elites. Why let them idle? Better just dispose them for good.

Or you expand the pool of natural resources...

Hello Mars!

What's stopping them? There's tons of empty land in the world. Go find a stream in the forest and live a sustenance-level life. Oh, they want everyone else to be miserable too.

Perhaps you know this already, but they would be outcompeted very quickly and disappear (like the shakers). It’s like how paying extra taxes voluntarily isn’t a substitute for wanting increased taxation.

The shakers died out because they were celibate.

Yep. What do you think degrowth will lead to if it’s done in the context of growth?

Nature doesn’t reward restraint, either in that kind of productivity or the other kind of productivity.

Wait a few decades and see if it exuberant growth ... What I think is that we might price natural resources much more expensively. Higher Price and thus growth is not always synonymous with more resources. It is an approximation but better means higher price not more resources.

> they would be outcompeted very quickly and disappear

So would we on a larger scale if they had their way.

Tragedy of the commons. Unless everyone does it, those that hold back will simply disappear.

A few thousands people generating no pollution won't even start to scratch the issue. It needs massive follow up to have an effect.

That didn't work out too well for people that didn't want to own land in England...

>Degrowth is now a buzz word in left-leaning and academic circles around the world

Ted Kaczynski and other far-right thinkers (e.g. Pentti Linkola) have been advocating for shrinking the economy for decades.

It’s not a left/right issue and one side doesn’t have a monopoly on anti-materialism.

I'm not sure how you characterize Kaczynski as far-right. He was an anarchist.

He criticized the anarchi-primitive view heavily. He was mostly just against technological advancement.

But I wouldn’t classify anarchism as left-wing either.

I apologize for the wall of text. I hope someone finds it interesting.

I think people in the West assume that because we are freer than most that we are not drowning in propaganda. Money really does run the show this planet over. Money and power really do seem to bring the worst out of people.

Economic growth is only needed for Ponzi economics, whether that be retirement funds, Social Security or stock market returns. Human beings are not some living aberration that requires growth or we die. Growth is only "needed" by the financial industry and holders of equities. As growing social unrest increases, and it will, people will slowly realize that consumption of cheap Chinese electronics do not make them happy. This idea that once we get over the hurdle of 100% automation we will all be able to live work and stress free in our post automation utopia where people can focus on the things that give them "meaning" and make them "happy" is absurd. Basic Income as a panacea for the lower class is another ridiculous idea that can only be imagined being successful if you first image human beings as blank slates whose programing is purely cultural and devoid of millions of years of instinctual hardwiring. The only thing I see Basic Income providing is as cultural grease (as in bribe) to keep people from rioting. The "need" for immigration is another epic lie needed only to keep the Ponzi scheme going. It blows my mind that the left let this made-in-marketing-heaven line of propaganda slide: "immigration is needed to supply the jobs that Americans don't want to do". It even sounds like a corporate slogan. Holy shit the gas-lighting. This is wage suppression. Americans don't want to do those jobs for what you want to pay them when you can instead take advantage of someone from a poor and broken country. This was big business stealing from Americans and it has contributed to the decline of the middle class. People seem to forget, or maybe they don't know, that the middle class was created through policy, just as it is now being dismantled through policy. Instead of this issue being talked about honestly we are told to ridicule those "xenophobes" who dare suggest that Americans could/should be doing those jobs for a non artificially lowered wage. Off-shoring and immigration are the same thing and no one is honest about this. They are supported by the same forces, for the same Ponzi effect, for the same concentration of wealth causing the growing income disparity we see. The "need" for immigration is also about the higher abstraction of the population Ponzi scheme. We as human being do not need to grow to thrive. There is no need to see just how many billions of us this planet and technology can sustain before biblical levels of suffering ensue. Europe importing millions of "refugees" (migrants)/immigrants to "fill the void" is purely the greed and entitlement of the Elites. They feel entitled to Ponzi economic comforts even though they did have to children themselves to support it. Less people means less load on the environment and less fighting over resources. This is a great thing especially for the environment as well as for everyone else on the planet not just those in Europe. Jared Diamond in his book Upheaval very slyly points out that immigration from the third world into the first world increases environmental problems by increasing gross carbon emissions and overconsumption. Yet as much as Diamond is loved by the left this is ignored, as if he didn't say it. Again the propaganda pumped out is multiculturalism and "diversity is our strength". Japan and the Norwegian countries beg to differ and are looked up to as models. Immigration is pushed to keep the Ponzi scheme going and to increase the Democrat voting base and not to give you more choices in local cuisine. The bullshit is miles high.

Can you really not envision a thriving human race without growth? International finance and corporate banking really do need growth. Either way economic growth is not sustainable indefinitely. Technology will not enable us to colonize the Universe anytime soon. Self driving cars are not happening in the next decade and the singularity is not happening in the next 5 decades, at least.

Looking through the comments I see multiple posts suggesting that non growth equals lowered standard of living. Standard of living has all ready started falling in America, most likely due to income disparity. Japan has not had much economic growth for the last 20 years yet they are living in the future. I have visited Japan, it's incredible. Japan feels like a future I'm not sure a multicultural country like American can ever achieve. Regardless, Ponzi economics is not necessary for anything other than easy money, especially for the Elites. Someone down at the bottom mentions Ted Kaczynski as a "far-right [thinker]". I think not. If you remove his savage deconstruction of leftism and academia from his writings he would be considered far left-wing. His philosophy is left-wing environmentalism and anti capitalism/tehcnology.

>After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.

So, this movement is communism by another name? I understand that the new bit is the reduction energy consumption and quality of life, but it seems to me that they first need to get to the communist stage and then they'll shrink the economy. In other words: it's a fantasy.

Once they get to doing communism, both the economy and the population will shrink automatically.

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