Capitalism's relentless drive for growth and deregulation would like a word with you.
My favorite book of 2020 if you'd like to read more: https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
My favorite book of 2020 if you'd like to read more: https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more
There are no other metrics that are remotely commonly used to determine real international policies. Every nation on earth is in explicit competition with every other to grow faster because of this. These policies are prescriptions by capitalist countries that weren't like this before and likely wouldn't be after.
It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.
> It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.
Capitalism requires no such thing. It’s human reproduction and striving for better conditions that requires economic expansion. That doesn’t change under socialism/communism/whatever.
Finally, GDP growth does not imply anything about carbon production. Some of the biggest growth sectors going forward are entirely about clean energy.
I know you've seen my book recommendation in the thread here; it's about the incentives behind growth, and how de-growth can work and still encourage human flourishing. Rather than just reacting negatively, why not look it up?
I think you are incorrectly characterizing capitalism, and people are off-put by the inaccuracy and it's implication that property must be taken from people. Capitalism is simple: it is an economic system where the means of production are owned and controlled by private citizens and operated for profit (the definition of profit is not always making lots of money). Nothing more, nothing less. A lot of the startup and tech economy is based squarely on private ownership of the means of production (i.e. companies). GDP and the focus on GDP growth is somewhat exclusive of whatever ism your country's economy is based on.
A good example of this is agriculture. We have less of that precious Iowan topsoil than we did 100 years ago, but crop yields are higher than ever. That's what capitalism is.
He's a marxist, so statements like that are grounded in a historical materialist analysis -- very basically, that the material result of policies is their reality, not whatever ideals they might aspire to. He makes a very solid case that capitalism can't really do anything else -- he doesn't just ask the reader to take this on faith (I would have hated it if that were the case).
The book does use a lot of such analysis, which can be pretty offputting if you're not used to it, but each such example is really cogent and well supported, so overall I found it a pretty phenomenal aggregation of history and very solid analysis/math for how we think about what's sustainable and what isn't.
His pattern in the book tends to be 1. strong assertion => 2. actual argument => 3. repeat assertion; I did find myself reacting to the first assertion there negatively because they often sound like overgeneralizations at first, but in each case he really did support them.
Not a very sound way of thinking if you care about confounding variables. Presumably there are always special exemptions when not analyzing capitalism? I.e. The material result of communist policies in the USSR (total collapse) don’t apply to communism because it wasn’t true communism? If so, then we don’t really have true capitalism either so you can’t really make any assertions about capitalism.
Note also that I'm not defending individual policies of the soviet union.
EDIT: wanted to tack on: if in 1989 the US and western europe had collapsed and become communist, I wouldn't take that as proof -- or a particular reason at all -- that capitalism didn't work. That would be idiotic -- we were engaged in a decades-long cold war with another giant power, and lost. I may have separate arguments about capitalism, as I do now, but the collapse has nothing to do with it.
Similarly, the collapse of the soviet union has everything to do with trying to eliminate poverty WHILE staring down the barrel of the largest and most powerful empire that's ever existed.
Here is a good article on why it's computationally challenging to completely plan an entire economy. https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
The real world is exactly the same. We live because we like living. Even if you only produce the most essential products you will still run into the meaning of life problem. Sure your food production is allowing people to live but why even let them live? If they didn't exist you wouldn't have to make food for them. It's completely circular at its core. Essential needs are purely artificial just as non essential needs are purely artificial. The reality is that people are selfish (both in a good and in a bad way), they want things, especially those that don't serve any essential purpose.
They don't care about endless growth, they just care about getting the best deal possible and that's exactly what capitalism offers. Communism at its core doesn't care at all. It just cares about the essentials and nothing else.
with other sectors we need governments still to make the transition
State legislators have been arrested in Ohio for taking bribes to pass anti-renewable legislation, but despite their arrest, the legislation they enacted is still on the books. The companies got what they wanted, the government still is suppressing solar in Ohio, despite the legal system putting corrupt politicians in jail.
Climate change is a kind of prototypical example of a tragedy of the commons. Capitalism has not been particularly noteworthy for solving these sorts of problems. I can certainly see it helping to make renewables more affordable, but that's simply not enough at this point.
Not sure what the recycling story is with carbon fiber. I suppose we could make extremely durable goods but that may not be desirable until we pull enough carbon out of the air.
These were just quick examples though. There’s bound to be a lot of uses for carbon, it’s abundant for a reason.
The point is we can leverage our consumer nature to incentivize markets that help solve climate change. We can literally consume our way out of this mess.
And this is why white environmentalists are not trusted by the environmental justice community. Too much vague moralizing, not enough understanding of the plight of people who are being oppressed by the current system, or even what the current system actually is.
It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/degrowth-and-m...
And while I agree with his numbered policy prescriptions (perhaps quibbling about a jobs guarantee versus universal income), the rhetoric and diction is so objectionable and wrong that it's like we are speaking different language. What he calls degrowth is actually massive growth and consumption in my view. Public services for all? FANTASTIC and exactly what we need. But that's not "degrowth," that's massive growth. Switch to renewables? That requires absolutely huge economic growth and change.
In practice, on the ground in communities using words like "degrowth" in their politics, degrowth is rich people continuing with what they have and nobody else getting access to it. "Degrowth" is the word and philosophy used to block projects that help working people because the wealthy are doing A-OK. The "degrowth" language allows the wealthy capitalists to hold onto everything, and will never enable the correction of wealth inequality and distribution problems of capitalism. I see it in my own small town, that is an outlier in the US. ~30% residents label themselves anti-capitalist, ~30% are working class non-landwoners without much political ideology except populism, ~30% are landlords trying to extract money. A significant chunk of the "anti-capitalist" segment are also landlords and influence the politics of the "degrowth" anti-capitalists to privilege the already privileged, this is really dangerous ways to think about things. The terrible language enables the reactionaries more than the revolutionaries. Make "capitalism" vague and unspecific enough to be a vague "bad" label, make "consumption" a vague and undefinable term, and it will be used by those in power as a tool to subvert any change.
For a school of thought that seems to abhor "contradictions," they seem to embrace them when it comes to using words.
Hickel and others who write on degrowth are mostly very clear about these definitions (and Less is More is exceedingly thorough on the matter), but obviously you have to read past the surface level to pick up some of the detail. That's not meant as a dig at you or to imply that you're not willing to do more reading, just to clarify that because oftentimes these analyses are miles apart from typical US/western thinking, a lot of digging can be necessary.
As I noted above, Hickel applies a historical materialist analysis in a lot of his work, which can take some time getting used to (and, indeed, did for me).
Well, unless the money is to be made by exacerbating the problem, but sure.
> Putting the right price on carbon will solve that.
State intervention to set prices to try to steer the market to make progress on social goals that it would not without State intervention is not capitalism.
If by “capitalist system” you mean “bourgeois socialist mixed economy that replaced capitalism throughout the developed West generally around the mid-20th Century through the efforts of a broad coalition of people fed up with the horrors of actual capitalism”, that's true.
But that system isn't actually capitalism, and the central role of government regulation aimed at channeling the effort of “private” industry by rearranging incentives to different places than they would be set by the free market is one of the central ways in which it differs from capitalism.
The only reason people pretend otherwise is to maintain the fiction that they are on the opposite side of the global capitalist/socialist struggle that predated general disillusionment with capitalism in the West, because even though actual ideology shifted, ideological tribal identity didn't.
I don't understand this comment. Capitalism is about maximizing outcomes within the context of a system. It's not about the rules that govern the system itself. It doesn't actually matter what goal you are optimizing for. There is also no such thing as having no policies. Not having a policy is a policy in itself.
The producer of an externality is actively using the laws of physics to extract value from all other individuals. That's not capitalism either. It's just someone abusing their power. It's like using a gun to rob someone except the harm is spread over more people.
If nothing is done against the externality then the government is implicitly accepting the externality and is effectively subsidizing the producers of the externality.
Now that we have established that government policies can be compatible with capitalism lets talk about the most extreme capitalist policies possible. Well, a capitalist policy would be based around aligning profit incentives with policy goals. Basically what you want is that companies and people that do the right thing make a load of money and those who don't, make a loss.
So what is an extreme example of a non capitalist policy? Rent control. You've just destroyed the ability for "greedy" landlords to make money off of doing the right thing, namely providing housing. Another non capitalist policy? Prop 13. The policy encourages hoarding housing instead of rebuilding and providing more housing. It's even self reinforcing because it lures normal people in and turns them into hoarders. Again, it's because you have destroyed the ability for greedy people to do the right thing.
Now carbon taxes are the extreme opposite, they are so extremely capitalist that they should bring tears to your eyes. The greediest business owner is the one that produces the least CO2 (or any other externality). It's a system for doing the right thing. The only flaw is that carbon taxes have to be global but since they can be enforced through CO2 tariffs an easy fix is available. There are extreme domestic growth opportunities available in green technologies but without the right incentives nobody will do it. It's absurd that we even have to have this discussion. People are begging for profitable domestic investments because the central banks are flooding the markets. It's not like we end up sacrificing anything if we put underemployed people to work.
No, that's rationality (in the social science sense) not capitalism.
Capitalism is a specific politico-economic system that reached its peak of dominance of the developed world in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that was named and first systematically described and critiqued by its 19th Century opponents.
(The two are connected in that there are popular arguments for the optimality of capitalism grounded in the assumption of rationality.)
And yet emissions keep climbing, because capitalism requires growth and demands deregulation.
| Excess energy can be dumped in to carbon sequestration
There is literally no scalable strategy for this, and no serious combination of strategies. Really. Nobody who actually studies this (who's not also trying to profit) thinks there is. Do the math on the world economy continuing to double every <20 years. Or maybe check out the book I shared above, it's really very good.
If your theory is in direct contradiction to actual facts and evidence, then the theory is not super useful for analyzing the world.
Emissions are down over the past 10 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
"Growth" as defined by GDP per capita is up over the past 10 years,
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...
"growth" defined as population is up over the past 10 years in the US, but falling in Europe:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/projected-population-by-c...
Also, capitalism is just fine with a shrinking economy, there's depressions and recessions. What does this grand theory say about those?
Throwing around broad terms with shifting meanings, and then changing those meanings around to fit each set of facts about the world, is a crazy way to deal with the world.
> Do the math on the world economy continuing to double every <20 years.
Easy enough, what's the problem. What sort of resource constraint are you thinking we hit? What defines a "dollar" or "doubling"? Based on your descriptions, there's zero chance I will bother to read the book you recommend, because it sounds like it has negative information content.
I mean, come on, what sort of BS statement is "capitalism demands deregulation"?? Capitalism demands regulation through policing. What sort of possible definition of "deregulation" can you ever provide that fits both these situations? The best reflection on your source is that there is some sort of very technical definition where this statement makes sense. But repurposing common words to narrow meanings such that they become jargon, then attempting to use jargon without explaining that there's a difference with the commonly accepted meanings of those words is just a completely unproductive way to communicate to the world.
Capitalism is obviously not "fine" with recessions -- we dump enormous amounts of money into the economy when they occur in an attempt to stimulate it, and inequality tends to widen permanently in the absence of policies to counteract this.