People are realizing that degrowth is bad
noahpinion.substack.com
noahpinion.substack.com
does his argument that Western countries' use of resource has started to inversely correlate with QoL improvement hold up in the face of those same countries outsourcing almost all manufacturing to other countries? It's all well and good that the US' use of metals is decreasing, but if that's just because China is using the raw materials and shipping the final products over then that's no better.
He also makes the argument that as non-industrialised countries begin to industrialise, they can just make use of non-material goods like we do. Is this not based on the assumption that other countries won't want similar standards of living to the US, ie car ownership, disposable and consumption goods, etc? We're talking about a multiplication of the production of goods.
From a systems standpoint, I think we need to be doing 2 things (for CO2 specifically, that's far from the only concern): reversing the increase of carbon in the carbon cycle (ie, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and sequestering carbon artificially if/where safe), and monitoring and increasing the bandwidth of the decarbonisation phase of the carbon cycle (soil, trees and the ocean playing the main role).
Looking and Carbon Tracker is pretty eye opening, if ones check how many coal based plants are planned in Asia. Funnily enough, Carbon Tracker estimates that 92% of those plants will be uneconomic, so, in theory China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan want to shoot their own foot for some crazy reason. My guess is that Carbon Tracker estimates are not that great...
https://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Kallis_2012_...
Service economies rise off the backs of offshoring primary and secondary production to developing economies. None of that stuff exists without the underlying production, which absolutely depends on extraction of biosphere resources.
Good luck growing your university-educated, service economy cities without the raw material and fossil fuel abundance it currently relies on. Being increasing abstracted from your foundations may feel secure but you'll topple just the same when they give way, even thousands of floors above.
You could perhaps make an argument that more layers of leverage could be layered on top of existing levels of productive extraction, but when we're talking about a reduction (by choice or circumstance) in the underlying raw extractive activity, that's insufficient.
>"The kind of massive intention reordering of global production and consumption that degrowthers fantasize about is not just pragmatically impossible to implement, it’s the kind of thing that essentially everyone in the world except for a few very shouty people in Northern Europe and the occasional Twitter activist is going to reject."
Can't disagree with this. But the proposed alternative seems just as untenable:
>"Making a rapid transition to green, sustainable growth will require huge new investments"
Putting aside the energy density and portability issues, and the stuff about rare mineral extraction, base load etc etc etc... Perhaps if the current economic irrationality we've had hanging around since 2008 of an essentially unbounded slush fund of capital that somehow never significantly depreciates perpetuates forever onwards, this kind of thing could be pulled off. I'm unconvinced that we've entered some kind of calm water beyond our historical cycles of boom and bust, rather that we're in an extended period of irrationality yet to come down to earth. Still, nice to be hopeful. Just strikes me that both possible futures are equally unlikely, much as either one of them would be wonderful if they came to pass. Certainly better than the (IMO) more likely other way this all goes.
Claiming that services like social media do not rely on higher consumption of raw materials is really far fetch. Good luck building growing a service like Facebook without: - growing mobile phone market - growing mobile network market - growing internet access - growing your servers behind it - the energy consumption associated with it
It's quite easy to ignore facts when omitting that the majority of the supply chain and user base behind that is not located in the US. I'm fairly confident that adding those numbers to those charts will give a different picture indeed
This is the relevant graph: https://www.nuestromundoendatos.org/exports/production-vs-co...
And now that the industry, mostly managers, have made a shitload of money, the common man is supposed to fix it all up.
Sorry. I know why you think it is important. However, I am too old to believe this system can be fixed. We are doomed, and its about time we start to accept that. We've trained people to consume and be dependant on supply chains. We are not going to unlearn this as a society. A few will deprive themselves of things they could consume. But these people are not going to be significant. The rest is going to go on like they learnt in childhood.
> Sorry. I know why you think it is important. However, I am too old to believe this system can be fixed. We are doomed, and its about time we start to accept that.
Well, good news! We passed legislation to limit ozone-depleting chemicals, and now the ozone hole has stopped getting worse and is now healing:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452
So we are not doomed, and it's good to not accept that. We CAN make changes and fix things. And it doesn't require getting rid of refrigeration (or energy), it just requires different refrigerants (or sources of energy).
Greenhouse gases are a product of our endeavour. Almost everything we do, unless it's "planting forests" has negative effect. Curbing that means consuming less, producing less. These are, by definition, going to dramatically affect quality of life.
Aside from the political and economic differences, the problems themselves are vastly different. Right now we're just starting to see climate change feedback loops kicking in. These are are catastrophically bad. While there is a near-zero % possibility that we will voluntarily reduce our annual co2 emissions (instead of merely slowing acceleration, or, as is the case most of the time, still actually increasing the rate year on year), feedback loops are out of our control.
Maybe we'll make changes to reduce our co2 emissions increases (unlikely). But I don't see how it's possible to actually stop emissions and begin taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Yet that's what we need to do .
It's simple: there's to much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere right now. We know this because there has been an increase in extreme weather, wildfires, melting of polar ice and killer heat waves. Ideally we should stop all emissions immediately and actually begin reversing what we've done. Yet day by day, year by year we are always adding more and taking about budgets, like the house is on fire and we taking about how much petrol we're "allowed to pour onto it". It's not a matter of if but when we lose the polar ice, we lose reflectivity. Much worse, when the artic soil thaws it will release methane in quantities that will be (and I think the word has lost its impact these days)... Catastrophic. There's no putting that the genie back in the bottle.
Edit: While I am absolutely pessimistic, I don't think we should throw our arms up and say, "screw it I'm driving a hummer and flying helicopters every weekend". People don't respond well to depressing fact, they switch off because they feel powerless. It is easier to effect a change by more uplifting means. But we must still be honest about the scale of the problem. Personally, I find it difficult to see a comparison between the ozone layer and this without getting a bee in my bonnet
Swap the energy source, and we’re (for the most part) fine. That’s 80% of climate change. The rest is agricultural emissions from livestock (and rice?) and agricultural land use plus a bit for cement (although fully cured cement, which takes decades, actually reabsorbs the CO2 the limestone itself emitted in the calcining process).
This narrative that climate change is just due to general human activity is entirely the narrative I’m seeking to attack. It’s false. It’s mainly (80%) the CO2 and methane emitted from fossil fuel usage. Switch to wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, and you’ve basically solved the problem like we did with the ozone hole. The climate will start to heal. It really IS just a swap out like with the ozone hole. And we basically have the tech to do this. It just sometimes costs slightly more upfront. The industrialized countries can do this just fine, barely breaking a sweat. Switch the grid aggressively to solar and nuclear, require all new cars and trucks to be at least plug in hybrid and then pure electric. Switch iron reduction to hydrogen (already happening), heat pumps for heating, cement produced electrically, and we’re basically there (besides some mop up of agricultural and land use emissions from farming). We’re just not doing it. At least, not the speed we should.
Also, if "all we have to do is stop burning fossil fuels and farming cattle" then isn't that an admission that climate change is the result of human activity? If it wasn't, then why would we need to change our behaviour?
And if it were really as simple as you make it sound to just switch off fossil fuel and use renewables, then why hasn't it happened?
Right now, a report says that in this century we could be looking at global temperature increases of 5°C+ above pre-industrial levels at current trends. How long does it take to build a nuclear plant? 30 years? How many are being built right now? How many active nuclear plants are being decommissioned? When are we going to ban all fossil fuel cars? 2050? When are we going to curb the number of methane producing livestock?
Yeah, once those feedback loops kick in fully there is nothing whatsoever we can do even if we finally get off our asses and try. That's all I'm saying.
[Poor] people will die by the millions, again and again until we go extinct or go back to a sustainable lifestyle.
"degrowth’s appeal comes from its implicit promise to recast genteel North European decline as some sort of grandiose world-saving moral quest."
Aka: "I don't want to give up my SUV. Let the collapse happen."
― Ayn Rand
Okay, so what does climate response look like in that world? I suspect it looks like investing massive amounts of money in nuclear and carbon capture. Developed countries have spent trillions on COVID response to keep some 65+ people alive. That mk eh would have been far better spent on climate technology.
If not voluntary, then forced. The ecosystem that carries all the growth is rapidly falling apart (relatively, with speed measured in decennia, generations or centuries). We cannot stay on the exponential paths we've taken the last 250 years for another 250 years, that is impossible. Let alone for another 2500 years
Just population growth alone, using the current curve (1.1%), will hit 118 billion people in 250 years and 5,812,724,005,588 billion (not a typo) people in 2500 years. Compounding exponential growth is quite literally unimanigable.
We cannot continue on current curves. No matter how efficient you make houses, produce iPads or food: exponential growth is unsustainable. Literally and figuratively.
There are a couple of different population projections out there and, of course, predictions about the future are hard. But all of them show a population peak around 2100 of maybe 10-12 billion people.
The same holds for population growth. As countries get richer the birth rate reduces. So there's very little chance that we'll stay on the current 1.1% curve, any more than we stayed on the analogous curve defined in 1950.
I would guess that the marginal value of cleverness or technology decreases over time
On a note addressing your population growth numbers, I just want to say that your numbers demonstrate that you are very unfamiliar with population growth dynamics and you should research the topic more. Those numbers are impossible and not going to happen (on earth) in any scenario whatsoever.
Agreed. Collapse or increasing eco-terrorism is my guess.
More serious analyses have shown that decoupling is as "magical thinking" as de-growth.[2]
I agree that degrowth is a hard pill to digest, and that converting our economy to greener alternatives may even fuel growth for some time, but I can't see how infinite growth should still be our goal, especially considering that human population will soon stabilise.
[1] https://russroberts.medium.com/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-g...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...
The charts showing that the US is consuming less resources as time goes on suggests the US is not growing. The financial shenanigans have decoupled the official statistics from reality.
There is a reason everyone is getting all stressed and politics are getting tenser - once growth stops, politics becomes about how to divide up a fixed pie.
This year's phone is ten times as "powerful" as one from five years ago, therefore we multiply phone sales by ten.
The same reasoning applies with cars, ignoring the fact that it's now nearly impossible to buy a car without power windows, power steering, automatic transmission, anti-lock braking, etc.
Degrowth argues that technological innovation won’t be enough to save biodiversity and decarbonise in time.
If you want to prove them wrong, don’t call them smelly hippies on a “grandiose world-saving moral quest”: that helps no one. Instead, invent electric cars, solar and wind energy, CO2 capture solutions, protein sources, etc. that are so cheap that you can replace alternatives. Whether those are ‘better’ can be subjective.
The article would be more convincing if it described the day in the life of someone with a middle-class Western lifestyle with no carbon footprint and not destroying wildlife habitats. By saying that current alternatives are not encouraging, he’s arguing for degrowth (or catastrophic environmental changes) not against.
Regardless of what mechanism we might invent for styling our growth oriented economy into a consumption reducing one, a big intervention is required, and we do need to intervene to avoid slamming (on ecological timescales) into malthusian limits in the ugliest way.
And the arguing isn't great either, when saying why their opponents arguments are wrong they demonstrate it partially by the following incredibly general statement:
> Past trends are no guarantee of future trends
and without any qualification why this would only apply to one sort of trend they assert their own trend as fact
> And the fact that rich countries have hit an inflection point where economic growth no longer depends on growing resource
Or in clearer words: "Your trend is false and will break tomorrow, but my trend is an eternal truth!". This sort of bluntly self serving argument does not fill me with confidence that there is much carefully crafter reasoning here.
I get this as an initial reaction but....why not just Google it before posting a lengthy comment based off of what it "sounds like"? As the sibling comments link shows, literally the first result for googling the term provides a long and detailed history of its proponents.
Abs the entire article is written from the perspective of someone concerned about sustainability (without thinking lower economic growth is a feasible path forward), which makes the assumption even more bizarre.
Well, we haven't been able to pull that off. Quite the opposite.
Asia is a dumpster now, their rivers are black stinky waters, trash is everywhere, climate is changing at an alarming rate, we have lose 60% of all the insect species, oceans are emptying, full of micro-plastic and with great current disturbances, extreme weather events are occurring more and more and the amazon forest is getting eaten.
But sure, tell me how your magical theory matches practice in your dream like land.
The article makes various strawen, starting with "the idea that economic growth requires growth in resource use" and "Degrowthers have no idea how to combine various resources"
Dunno how you should measure wealth/growth/etc.
If we all plan on getting wealthy via moving money between accounts, buy low/sell high, and surveillance advertising, the sky's the limit.
Having said that, i think some economist tried to do a correlation between adjusted dollar income to lifespan, and found that for each cent you make until you earn at least 5$ (adjusted) a day in industrialized/globalized countries, your lifespan at 5 is growing pretty fast. after this, the gains are minimal, so the actual limit on poverty should be 5$.
Excluding China, the %age of the world population under 5$ (adjusted) is diminishing since the 70s, as income from capital outperform income from labor faster than the marginal productivity increases (AKA: Piketty was wrong in his book Capital in the 20th century, capital did not take all productivity gains, it took more than that).
I do not have an opinion on degrowth, i hope it won't happen in my lifetime (because i'm an hypocrite, but at least i'm not hiding between either Singer/Gate optimism or other techno-optimism), i'm not actually convinced we will manage to avoid one, and i think a controlled one will be better than one that id forced upon us.
Not only it's arbitrary, but it's not updated on yearly basis, even if the cost of life increases by 20% every year.
In terms of a strategy game, inflationary economy shifts the balance from upgrading your units (more efficient) to just producing more with current units.
In short: It's not that I hate cars, I like cars, I like driving. But in order to not break the world we live in we need to make fewer cars and drive them less. If you can suddenly make a car that does significantly less damage or negative damage then PLEASE make it, I will buy it. Growth Yay!
- When buying second-hand, I still use a share of the car lifespan, and it is this lifespan that makes the value of building it in the first place.
- I buy it from a person or a system (a leasing company in my last car's case) that periodically orders new cars, so I participate in making their business model possible by providing an output.
- Not everyone can live of second hand stuff: since I brought my previous car to its death (near 300.000km), another one has to be created somewhere to allow my next buy.
- Up to what mileage and years is it wise to extend the life of an old car when new ones burn less per km?
- I also calculated my share of atmospheric CO2 for the life of my previous car (6 liters gasoil per 100km over 250.000+ km), and it is a already a disaster for a single car...
That made me consider an electric car (new since they are still very rare second-hand) but only Tesla matches my needs and Tesla does not match my financial reach. Indeed the others are either hybrid-jokes (with 50km full-electric when you have the wind in the back) or city-only electric cars (poor recharge network and only 200km range).
My current idea is to reduce kms by adopting more teleworking (thanks Covid to push my employer to consider it) and waiting for a better offer for electric cars (even new).
Rebuilding a motor or transmission requires less energy and raw materials than making a new one. Replacing a motor or transmission with a new part requires less than making a new car.
But with economies of scale in manufacture, labor costs for repair, plus consumers' perceived need for new vehicles, results in cars being scrapped when they could otherwise be repaired.
My nearly 300.000 km vehicle costed thousands per year in maintenance, and a moderate crash sealed its "death".
Obviously a car in the same condition in a poor country could be fixed by a low-wage worker with used parts for another 100.000 km.
Therefore we know there is some limit - and we are just arguing about where that limit is.
The Global Footprint Network with their "Overshoot Day" believe we are already beyond that sustainable limit and, to be honest, with increasing populations that (quite rightly) demand Western living standards, I doubt we will ever be sustainable.
If we're allowed colonization of space, we can only travel at a finite speed. Humans can overtake a finite radius in a year, resulting in a cubic rate of growth in volume. Exponential growth is ultimately limited by the finite speed of light and dimensionality of our universe.
Take aviation. You can make aviation green by using hydrogen (on medium distances), batteries (on short distances) or efuels (everywhere, it's basically kerosene, but made with renewable electricity). Ok, great.
Now there's an EU research project that has run some numbers. Note that this project happened in collaboration with aviation companies, it's unlikely to paint a particularly pessimistic picture. Page 44 here: https://www.cleansky.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files/202...
Their calculation is that you need between 21 and 32 Petawatthours per year to green aviation (depending on how optimistic you are about hydrogen-based aviation). That is around the same as the total amount of electricity the world uses today (all electricity, not just green electricity).
They assume a 4 percent growth rate for aviation, which is in line with what aviation organizations expect.
I have trouble imagining that this is realistic. Like: I'm pretty optimistic about renewable energy. But I just don't think it's very plausible to say: "We'll make all our electricity green, and then we'll add the same amount in green electricity just for aviation, and oh, we'll probably do the same for a bunch of other industry sectors that will need similar amounts" (there are studies with similar numbers e.g. for the chemical industry). Like I just don't think it's plausible to green all electricity and then grow the electricity sector by something like 500% in a short amount of time.
And when you come to the conclusion that this is not realistic you should start to wonder if you should really assume that aviation will just continue to grow and grow. (And the same is pretty much true for a lot of sectors where greening is not impossible, but challenging.)
But more importantly I see some reasonable degrowth arguments as advocating an end to consumerism. To no longer measure the wealth of a country by the extend of it's material consumption and financial transactions. We are optimizing the wrong thing. Imagine a world with a basic income, where someone who just likes to cut hair decides to cut hair for other people as long as they get to be creative while doing it. This would lower the GDP and nominally be degrowth, but not because the scope and range of possible human activities has decreased.
We have coupled status to consumption, money and being productive. I believe that this has become the overwhelming function of much economic activity. Otherwise it's not rationally understandable why people would opt to work 70 hours a week, barely know their kids, in order to make sure they can afford things they don't really need.
I don't really see the article(s) linked contradicting this line of thought in the degrowth community.
Growth doesn’t mean that we make materially more things, but that we make better things. Compared to a torch, a calculator, a phone, a GameBoy, etc… an iPhone requires far less raw materials. This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth is indeed possible.
We don’t need to work more or consume more things unless we either give up on innovation or if we think innovation is not possible because we have reached a knowledge boundary. The former would be a silly decision to make, the latter is an assumption that should be demonstrated.
Mass alone does not tell the whole story.
The horse does not need improved roads the way most bicycles do, and is more reliable off road than most mountain bikes.
Lots of food for thought here.
Then, it might just mean that your father's calculator use material of higher density.
More seriously. when building something, there's a lot more material than what comes in the final product: - the scrap generated by the by the manufacturing process. The more elements, the more it's going to be. - the number of defects, for every parts of the device (for some parts it will be extremely low, for some it would be quite higher, but there's always some). Granted, some defects can be re-purposed, but it's not always the case - The raw materials to actually manufacture (like water) - The average number of repairs required over a lifetime (replacing the screen on a iphone is quite frequent) - The materials required to build the supply chain that can build such devices. - The materials required to generate the energy required to build the factories.
And there's plenty of other things to take into account. In the end it's not about the volume of raw material as such, that doesn't mean much as it is. It's for each material, to take into consideration if it's renewable, what's the impact of extracting it and many other questions.
Such growth is anything but exponential. In fact, it's logarithmic.
It really doesn’t matter if whatever is created is better or just more of the same.
New things will require more things.
I highly recommend reading Rich Gold’s excellent book The Plenitude:
Very often, free alternatives / those not involving 3rd parties, simpler living, are better for us overall. But if more expensive options are available, we are pressured to take them so that we are not left behind / feel like we fit in / have a social life.
Also, at some point certain things are just 'good enough', and marginal improvements require a ton of effort but don't make life better. For example, mobile phones - an 8 year old phone would work just fine, if not for forced obsoletion. Yet tons of effort go into very marginal improvements, because if you don't do it, your competitors will.
If this were true, your innovating competitors will lose money. There’s a discussion to be had on bad innovations (such as almost everything related to the so-called “attention economy), but they are a drop in the ocean.
For example, my iPhone 6 is getting obsolete just because it would not get latest iOS updates. Many apps are no longer supporting the old OS version. Yet these apps are not video games requiring the latest hardware - they are simply glorified web pages. There is no objective reason for why the phone could not run them.
People in a lot of places literally couldn't socialise physically for much of the last 18 months, surely social media must have helped?
Like one can argue that it's a cure worse than the diseases, but it's difficult to say that it's entirely useless.
I think if you correctly account for all the materials required to support every last stage of process from dirt, ore and sand all the way to the finished iPhone, the result would be awe-inspiring and dismaying.
What a silly assertion. The mere fact you can't create something easily does not mean it does not necessitate less resources to build. The support system an supply chain is huge, but the resources it uses could be quite small if you divide by the number of units produced.
Even so, there are many tools that a smartphone replaces that would have needed in the past a full product just to do a single thing. It can replace a PC, a game console, a tv, a flashlight, a calculator, tons of books, measuring instruments, keys. Many many things that have now moved into one small device. Maybe the resources for a torch are not more than for a iPhone, but adding all the functions it fills, surely, it is more resource efficient than the past alternatives.
Former point? No. Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to smelt aluminum, or form a CPU-ready silicon wafer? Wood for torches grows out of the ground. You don't seem to have any idea of supply chain infrastructure, and it matters. There's a fairly close mapping between the amount of infrastructure involved, and the cost of the thing (Veblen goods aside). You can buy a flammable stick fairly cheaply, but buying a smartphone really does not wind up being the cost of the raw materials or even close… and this is because you're not looking at the infrastructure costs of producing the final result.
Sorry, you're way off base. Smart technological stuff is really cool in its own right, but it's mind-bogglingly wasteful by 'degrowth' standards.
How many torches do you have to burn, to repeatedly melt, refine, cast, machine etc. just the aluminum alone from your aluminum-cased device?
An iPhone 12 has 164 g, of which 24% is aluminum. [4] => ~39.36g of aluminum in one. Ergo, your, presumably wood torch, would have to weigh 865g in order to be able to have the same embodied energy as an iPhone.
Of course, this is highly simplified and silly and full of wonky napkin math, but at least I expect we're in the same order of magnitude range for the estimation.
Regardless, doing the math, it is lower than I expected. Also, the greatest issue I took with your claim that "If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw sand." -> that sentence makes no sense and fails to prove your point. Maybe the point is correct, but it is NOT proven in any way by that sentence. I don't even have a stance on the torch/iPhone comparison (although the effort I expended on the napkin math might show otherwise, that was just a fun little exercise for me)
And the wider point is that inovation might be better for the environment than lack of innovation. I am convinced that if we could move to a sustainable world if everything we bought would be higher quality and had more thought in it, abeit more expensive. The consolidation of purpose, as you nicely phrased it is one of the critical components that work for this "techstenance".
And the stronger point, related to the iPhone specifically is that
[1] https://theconversation.com/the-trouble-with-aluminium-7245
[2] http://www.woodenergy.ie/frequentlyaskedquestions/
[3] https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_12-10509.php
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-metal-in-an-iphone-...
In the debate, this is called decoupling, meaning the decoupling of rising material and/or energy consumption with economic growth.
The problem is that absolute decoupling couldn't been shown anywhere, when looking at actual empirical data. This is a pretty exhaustive summary of current research about this: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
We have S curves. Lots of them. We're seeing the slowdown of the semiconductor industry S curve now. But we get new S curves in the beginning phases all the time. That's why we keep having so great growth.
But de-growth is just a weird concept. Why would we need it? What does it even mean? Would we burn all the books so we become ignorant about technology? I hope not!
However to give away money, you need to get them from somewhere, basic income means that work will be taxed more heavily. At some point this will break economy and, in less optimistic scenario, lead to social unrest or takeover of the power by some ultra populist party - we have already seen in the history how helping the poor, discriminated "class" typically ends.
Besides being a fundamentally politically charged statement, I see no good argument on why not, so I'm sure you're ready to present some evidence behind that.
Where you're completely right is that fundamental exponential resource usage is not sustainable.
But in fact, OP makes a pretty convincing argument that resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth (in fact, exponentially so).
Adding the exponentially growing level of automation and still-dropping cost-effective renewables into the mix (as well as their synergetic effect on each other), it's a rationally following thought that energy will be almost-free in the near future.
With an exponential growth of external (solar) energy into the system, it's not far off to channel this energy into GDP to sustain the growth.
Just one example: Water problem. There's a drinking water shortage everywhere but if you look at the globe from orbit, you see the planet does not have a water shortage.
In fact, it's just an energy shortage of desalinating that water. Bring that almost-free water to the deserts around the equator and you're in fact creating resources.
I think the idea of degrowth is a fundamental error. It's only when the ecological finally gets economical when you convince the naysayers as well.
Growth has consequences. People who optimize for economic gain are paid in part to conceal negative consequences to keep their short term gains from being inhibited.
If you can attain exponential growth without consequence, you’ve found a way to simply create matter or violate some law of physics, and honestly, that’s a bigger scientific achievement than economic.
We'll find a way if there is growth to sustaing it. On the contrary, degrowth will just lead to shrinkage and the zero-sum mindset behind will soon create fights for all the resources perceived as limited, distracting from the climate crisis. IMHO that's the only sure way to lose the fight against climate change.
And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a mountainside is no different from what humanity has been doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes. We’ve done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc. All those were great in small amounts, then people realized they could pretend there were no consequences to milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels and countless other environmental problems, all because people previously avoided accepting consequences later on.
It's also a straw-man to imply that degrowth advocates want to eliminate all development. Nobody I know (but I am not that well read in the field, maybe it's just my pocket) is talking about stopping technological research, or science, or cultural growth. It's about the subset of human activities that are today labelled as economic.
I believe the fundamental model of having money and passing it around, and thereby acknowledging that we do things for each other is absolutely fantastic. But the secondary effects absolutely swamp the primary purpose by now.
I can do things for other people, but I can also run ad campaigns, or engineer the culture in such a way that they will desire what I can produce. Desires are not a preexisting thing that a disinterested economic system is more and more efficiently satisfying. The desires are shaped by the wider social system of which the economic system and its intrinsic logic is a core part.
Either way, I more precisely should have said "fixed pre-existing thing". Obviously there are some needs and desires rooted in biology and probably, somewhere in the incomprehensible depth of time, these kick-started things. However, as fun as it is to speculate about pre-history, it's largely irrelevant to the conversation. There is no meaningfull way to understand why people pay many 1000$ for a pair of shoes without first establishing that humans build societies with a culture that is largely decoupled from biological imperatives.
As an aside: Humans seem to have a great need to pretend that their cultural constructs, whether gods or status symbols or desires or gender roles, are objective aspects of the universe. This does seem to be a very deep need... But the fact that this is a fallacy doesn't imply that there isn't also a rich tapestry of objective truths, and a subtle interaction between the two.
Status seeking would likely be the biological imperative. Of course the specific desire is going to be culturally dependent.
> Do you assume that humans in the past were incapable of creating desires?
I assume that desires are not created but rather channelled or cultivated within their cultural context based on what's available. Sure, someone with a new product is going to use advertising to try and influence consumers to buy their product. But this assumes their product is something consumers would desire, or something that can be associated with something consumers desire, such as status or convenience.
This assumption does not stand up to scrutiny in my opinion. History shows otherwise.
People go to die in holy war to impress, or serve their country. This is not biologically sensible. And yet they did.
This is what I mean with decoupling. You can of course claim that this is just a strong version of status seeking being channelled, or you can invent another base desire that you think is biologically sensible and that the wish to die in war is just a cultivated version of. But your "base desires" don't have any explanatory value at that point. They don't survive Occam's Razor. They only serve to satisfy your psychological need that the things you care about are _real_.
In actual fact, most markets and technology follow something more like and S-curve, with exponential growth in the first half and exponential decay in the second. We need a viable economic theory for the second half. "resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth" sounds like it's referring to being in the second half, without recognising the absurdity of pretending something is growing exponentially when it's value is still measured in terms of whatever is still rare.
It sounds wonderful. Here’s the problem. Most people don’t want a creative hair cut. Most people want the same boring haircut everybody else has. And they need it now, not when you’re feeling “inspired” or “creative.”
A world where nobody is incentivized to provide value to others aside from “creative satisfaction,” is a world where nobody provides value to others.
Whether or not you agree with all the things people buy, the fact is, most people buy most things because they find them useful (the top GDP-contributing activities are rooted in things like food, water, housing, transportation, clothing, etc.)
Ending consumerism, means the end of people doing useful things for each other.
This includes all the peaceful global cooperation between countries that is a byproduct of a consumer driven global economy.
I don’t think changing the mindset of countries with nuclear weapons from optimistic growth to pessimistic scarcity is going to have the positive outcomes you think it will.
Unfortunately, when humans fight over scarce things, they tend to kill each other.
This requires a loose definition of "useful" which includes status signalling, satisfying an impulse to buy things, and so on, to the point it's tautological; every action is useful. I would not attribute the bulk of consumer spending to an expectation of usefulness, otherwise. Among the useful things, people still spend extra to buy pleasure foods, pleasure clothes, pleasure housing, pleasure transportation.
> Ending consumerism, means the end of people doing useful things for each other.
I think if you look at how consumerism is defined, it's apparent we can have the exchange of goods and services without it. Economic systems can exist without consumerism, and existed before it.
People seek consumption, money, and power. There's no real self-regulating mechanism for any of these things, as far as the drives of the humans that manifest those outcomes. We don't automatically have an 'enough' meter. As such, we don't manage ourselves well, and it falls to larger systems to identify these losses and mitigate them… which is always contentious.
I always feel these 'actually exponential growth is good' arguments end up resting on suspicious grounds. They fall into the category of moral arguments, where the moral is 'I should not have to examine or curtail my own whims'.
"The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years."
It is possible to have sensible debate without immediately putting people into the blue or red team. We can do better than this.
The only purpose of labeling people based on a particular belief/position is to make it easier to attack with generalizations, and polarize the debate. Now you have to pick a side - are you a degrowther or not?
There are reasons to labeling people other than those you suggest. For example, maybe it simply was the first way to express his argument that came to mind. Or maybe, identifying a group of people who think X can be part of the debate. For example, suppose libertarians are all funded by billionaires. That might suggest a motivation for libertarian thought. You couldn't know this without identifying the people who are libertarians.
Lastly, it's often good that people have to "pick a side". Do you think we should aim to stop economic growth, or don't you? It's good that you should come to a clear position on this topic. Unclear positions might be nuanced, yes. But they might also be based on unclear thinking, or a desire to please everybody.
Anecdotally, I quickly tire from reading or hearing arguments full of the polarization labels (liberal/conservative/neocon/neoliberal/etc). Wonder if I’m alone in this.
That’s such an anti-teamer thing to say.
I say this acknowledging that the actual criticisms here are reasonable and I don't have any particular disdain for the post or the discussion, just that I am totally unsurprised that you picked up on it being oddly insular.
Does this include the outsourcing of production to countries in asia?
What about shipping? And the production of the shipping vessels? Waste disposal?
How much of that has been achieved by manufacturing everything in China?
This doesn't prove that US economy grew while the global resources usage went down, just that the resource usage was moved offshore.
In particular, from that page, consumption-based CO2 emissions of the US have gone down since 2007.
Also, how do they know where all imported items come from? Many people buy from Alibaba or other Chinese websites which rarely declare the actual items inside delivered packages.
k% annual economic growth when energy intensity and material intensity decrease k% per unit of GDP can go forever.
His Energy and Civilization (and the earlier (Energy in World History), demonstrate the phenomenal role of energy in bringing about modernity. Making the modern world : materials and dematerialization looks at the material side.
Overgrowth is bad
We need a sense of inner balance
What a load of bullshit.
"At its core, I feel like degrowth’s appeal comes from its implicit promise to recast genteel North European decline as some sort of grandiose world-saving moral quest. "
IIRC the decline is about 1.5% per year and it is forecast to increase considerably.
The same has been true of Japan for two decades,South Korea for one decade, and China's working age population peaked in 2015. China is running out of people in its rural areas that it can draw on for its factories.
The USA, Canada, and Australia are propped up by immigrants.
(Work, GDP, is done by working age people. This is not always obvious to economists.)
The arguments made by this article did occur to me. Consumption != tonnage. "Economic Growth" is very abstract, an abundance of pricy yoga lessons is not environmentally destructive.
The communist's retort to the retort also followed this blog's reasoning: "Yeah but all that C02, pollution and destruction stuff does equal growth IRL. Maybe past trends aren't the final say, but Why TF do you expect next decade (2005-2015) will be less filthy than the last?! Don't give me "could be's."" - ..We sip wine from a plastic cask thing that students drink.
My retort to that would have been:"Real life? Pfff! Pfff, I say. How exactly do you expect economic reverse gear to play out IRL. Poverty makes for some real political nastiness?!
From here unto "politics" and away we go... just like this blog, which is quite a good rendering of the debate IMO. Well written.
Abstract, vast concepts like "growth," "consumption," "politics," "earth" and such Grand Abstractions make these debates both impossible and unavoidable. Everything seems to come into it and lead to it. I've changed my opinions here many times over the years.
I was getting a circa-2005 econ education att. Peak monetarism, conservative ascendance and perhaps the neoliberal highpoint. I was also studying philosophy, so had the ways, means and student bumminess to look into old marxist and hegelian retorts to pose this communist dude at our next drinking session. It's always fun to ambush a believer with their own unread sacred texts... It's good headology, so says the witch.
I don't remember what came of that ATT, but these days Hegelian swinginess tends to frame a lot of my thoughts on such grand questions. Maybe the damned communist did manage to sneak some of his religion into me, in a roundabout way.
Marx & early communists were actually pretty awed by technology, growth and such. The promise of abundance and changeful times was one of the things that enabled radically different thinking about the future. The future would not be like the past, or present. You might be surprised to hear that communists were kind of right about a lot of "peak capitalism" concepts. A lot of markets did peak, margins and even market size did whittle to nothing. "Politics" dictates much, at this point. Monopolies or "structured markets," in modern parlance dictate much, at this point. Textile markets went through it. Coal. Fishing. Arguably cars.
"Peak capitalism-ish" dynamics played prominently in the economies of the late 1800s and this lasted generations. They're not always the biggest economic happening everywhere & at all times, but they usually appear multiple times on a top 10 list of major issues.
To bring this ramble back to the start.... Aggregation is an abstraction, a necessary one to reason about these questions. "Growth" of "Stuff" is abstract. It leaks. But, it also holds water. Ignoring the leak caused Keynes, as well as most economists of his day (1920s) to expect extreme abundance soon... famously, a 15 hr, men-only workweek by the 1980s.
Neither communists nor liberals really accounted for the difference between how "growth" would impact simple manufactured goods like spoons, microwaves & calories relative and housing or personal transport. Some became much more abundant than the others. Back then, a lot of people had basic housing with little or no furniture & possessions. Today, a poverty predicament will often be "no housing, furniture gets dumped." Abundance works in mysterious ways, and scarcity hounds us still.
We certainly need to degrow our negatives. We also, IMO just as certainly, need to grow the stuff we need more of. We need to avoid getting so stuck in frames that we can't see out of them. Some questions are hard, like transport. Hard, but not impossible and there are real options.
Some, we stopped thinking clearly about long ago. Housing is often less abundant than 100 years ago. Yes, our standards for "decent housing" have risen. But that is far from abundance. In other areas we're far from sustainability.
It's basically like this:
Degrowthers, like e.g. Jason Hickel, generally want a more equal society, perhaps even socialistic, and think that the climate crisis is a blatant proof that capitalism is unsustainable and that to keep trying to save it is basically to prefer go down with the ship than to even try to change course.
On the others side, people like Noah Smith are more in the status-quo lane that most of all want to save capitalism from itself using massive investments in technology etc - but not necessarily any systemic changes.
This naturally have caused these two crowds to throw pretty heated arguments at each other, and certainly not "unbiased objective facts" - if that ever has existed.