Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
I generally like American Affairs. Though I'm exhausted by the left vs right slap fight. IMHO, anarchism and liberation theology are intrinsically outside of left vs right, liberal vs reactionary; they reject those dichotomies, and are better understood as criticism of the establishment and power structures. In other words, to an anarchist, there's little difference between the political philosophies of Liberal and Conservative, little difference between Catholics and Protestant. Rather, it's about speaking up for the weakest.
Skim reading Illich's wiki, I would agree that he's a "radical", and that his contemporarous critics mislabeling him a "reactionary" is kinda proving his point. Today, you see the same kind of pushback against David Graeber and David Wengrow.
The strawman equates growth with additional non-renewable resource extraction + increased consumerism. Mainstream theories explain growth with increases productivity - producing more with the same inputs.
Let's examine a thought experiment - the world reverts to living as in the 18th century. It will be mass starvation as we will not be able to produce enough food and the surving people will clear the forests for firewood and land, exhaust the soils with primitive agriculture. Both humans and the environment will be much worse off.
What's the point of (economic) growth if not to meet the demands of the consumerism? You gotta keep consuming stuff to fill the void that consuming stuff creates. There's nothing wrong with consuming less. Look at all the fat fucks on the streets. The needlessly big, loud, and fuel hungry vehicles. It's bad for all us.
How about living longer and healthier? Education, preserving the environment, care for the sick, young and elderly, all of that can be much improved and if you have a bigger GDP.
There’s an analogy here to code bloat and minimum viable product, I’m sure.
You may find this interesting? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
The author forgot to mention that they have one thing in common: all this villages it is mostly older people that live there, with few young ones left, mostly doing agriculture related work.
Most young people have left these villages due to the lack of economic opportunities. So, this thing called ‘degrowth’ is just economic stagnation.
Also, you don’t have to travel in Europe to see this. We have the Amish folks here, and that’s what a successful ultimate degrowth is. In Southern Europe it is mostly forced due to economic conditions.
There are a lot of left wing radicals that advocate for ‘degrowth’, but that ultimately is advocating for poverty, and bring the US back to the 70s.
The libertarian view of degrowth, is to leave like a ‘homestead farm’, while the left version is to live in some giant communist coop where people consume only what’s needed, but this time it is with the ‘old fashion” twist.
52 failed attempt at communism should have given them a clue that it doesn’t work.
Degrowth = poverty for the masses, while still few elites enjoy and live a lavish life.
Ask yourself, once this inflection point is reached and quality is no longer increasing, does a growth economy make sense? At this terminal stage of economic growth there is an increase in negative externalities in the pursuit of ever-diminishing profits. Much more waste as the shoes are built with worse and worse materials. More exploitation in an attempt to reduce labor costs. Do you think that over the last 30 years, shoes have increased in quality relative to the profit margins of these companies? If the answer is no, then it means we need to figure out a way to deal with terminal-stage industries.
Sure, there are people advocating for everyone to go live like the Amish, but to me degrowth means that if an industry can no longer achieve growth through innovation or increases in productivity, we should acknowledge that that industry has peaked, and not try to squeeze every last dollar out of it through exploitation or waste.
It seems to me the current choices, dictated by culture, capital, and economics, are a) grow or b) decline.
Is a steady state possible? Can a cobbler, independent farmer, carpet cleaning service, or whatever, do their thing for 40+ years?
I don't know.
Certainly not if they accept outside investment capital, where the lender is expecting an ever greater return on their investment.
Certainly not if when there are predators. eg "Your margin is my opportunity" -- Jeff Bezos
Certainly not if your gig is mooted by technological progress.
Examples of successful steady state ventures would help me (us) think through these issues. But I'm struggling to think of some. Residential plumber (and similar trades)? Automobile mechanic?
The closest thing I can think of is small family-owned ventures. Or on a larger scale perhaps the Cuban cigar industry? It remains labor intensive and is locked to a specific region which means growth prospects are limited. It also exists under a socialist regime so there's no incentive for growth.
> Back in 2008, a Bank of Korea report found that of 5,586 companies older than 200 years in 41 countries, 56% of them were in Japan. In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200211-why-are-so-man...
I've often wondered why Japan seems to maintain a culture of high quality artisinal work when the rest of the world is trending toward cheaper, lower quality mass produced goods. Perhaps these are related.
For example there is a video series of workers in Japan-- the titles are usually like "Daily Life of an X in Japan" and workers are often doing things in their downtime like cleaning the office, detailing the delivery trucks, power washing the sidewalks in front of the business, etc. In the US these practices would be seen as wasteful and would either be ignored, contracted out, or have a dedicated employee to do the work.
Unfortunately the Japanese model has its own shortcomings, but maybe there is a hybrid option that could benefit everyone.
Libertarians don't advocate degrowth or even homesteading per-se. Some of the Free Stat Project people are into it, but not many. The homesteaders I've met seem to often be traditionalists or green types who got disillusioned with city/suburban life.
Ikaria is full of old pensioners that recieve money from mainland. It is unsustainable model, is fueled by deficit spending and "growth" mentality, author critisizes.
Yes, I know this continued growth thing is not sustainable in the medium to long term (and saying that until very recently meant you were branded as a stupid Malthusian, still does, but less so), but I think we should stop f.ing around when it comes to naming stuff and call it what it is: we need less stuff to consume for the ecosystem to remain stable (or so we currently think), which means more poverty for the majority of us.
Of course, many low-middle-class to working class people from the West will also fall on the wrong side of all this, but in a way they already have started experiencing it, like you mention (you can look at existing NIMBY policies in the West as de facto de-growth policies that directly and negatively affect those socio-economic chunks of the populace).
According to them, the actual "degrowth" has to happen in the global north where economies are over-saturated [0]:
> We live in a world where poverty remains and those with unmet needs require more resources to satisfy them. We also live in an ecologically-constrained world struggling to cut emissions as fast as possible. In that context, by reducing consumption in the global North (and more generally for all of those who are over-consuming), one could free some of these resources for the people who need it the most. Ensuring basic needs and well-being for all necessarily implies limiting consumption in high-income regions and wealthy households in order to enable resource-poor countries and households to reach decent standards of living. In other words, degrowth in the global North is a prerequisite for sustainable development in the global South.
[0]: https://timotheeparrique.com/sufficiency-means-degrowth/
The question doesn't really matter. Whether we want it or not, economics will ultimately be subject to the laws of physics. We cannot sustain infinite growth on a planet with finite resources and carrying capacity. We've known this as far back as 1966 when Kenneth Boulding touched on these ideas in his essay "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth" [0].
Holding the global north accountable for their footprint is to me one of sanest and most civilized pathways considering the ensuing implications of alternative scenarios.
[0] http://arachnid.biosci.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Boul...
No, in fact, your idea of “reality” is completely disconnected from the actual real world.
A billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty over the last generation. The share of extreme poverty worldwide has declined. Most of the rest are expected to be lifted until 2030. [1]
Even comparing your life to your parents, you have access to better medical drugs, more information, better technology, and depending on where you live, also bigger and better apartments and cheaper transport.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty#is-the-world-on-t...
I would need to make at least 50% more income than my dad at each stage of his life for this to be true.
Probably not. You may personally be experiencing downward mobility, but real median household income is much higher in the US today than it was 30 years ago.
Edit: In US terms, "real" means that it has been inflation-adjusted. I don't know how it is in the US, but elsewhere governments frequently publish inflation numbers that have nothing to do with purchasing power (i.e. the inflation can be 3%, but the purchasing power of a household has still gone down by 5.4%). This makes such numbers seem a lot rosier than they are. Linking to actual data (which allows for looking at the whole picture rather than whatever graphs an agency chose to publish) allows us to see what's going on properly.
We waste so much in our current world.
It's actually totally possible to continue "growth," aka increased human output per hour, whilst consuming less resources.
Our economy is merely badly constructed, to not price in waste. Our economic system is designed to produce as much waste as needed if it makes things slightly cheaper.
Charge money for waste.
Charge for excess water use, charge for inefficient heating, charge for plastic waste.
Cash obsessed capitalists will turn green so fast you can't blink, the second wasting our planet's resources costs them money.
Maybe 6 billion of those are stuck in a variation of poverty, deprivation or living in a country with awful access to education and other necessities.
I'd say we have a good 200-300 years of work to fix those problems.
Figuring out "infinity" can happen after that.
As for water, how do you define "excess" use? We have a water shortage in California and it's not because residents are taking long showers or washing their cars. 80% of our water is used for agriculture, including crops that are extremely water intensive like alfalfa, rice, and almonds. Farmers have little incentive to conserve due to the way water rights are tied to property.
You could be in place like Japan where you have lower population, but still productivity growth such that incomes don't decline.
You could also be a place like pretty much everywhere in the world before the Industrial Revolution when the Malthusian Trap was a popular thought - and your population grows but productivity declines. GDP goes up, but you get more miserable. Not great.
I don't think anyone imagines falling incomes as awesome.
Additionally, even if productivity and population decline - the Fed can always devalue money such that your income goes up - even if your situation is getting materially worse.
I don't know why people obsess over population growth. We already don't want to invest in the people we have.
Productivity growth should be the thing we all want. There's not a lot of people that are like: Damn those tractors that stole all the agricultural jobs!
For the most part - we're happy 90% of the population doesn't have to work in agriculture.
If you double some poor saps commute that grows GDP too.
If diverted from savings, this grows current GDP. If diverted from some other category of spending, it’s likely neutral. (If diverted from higher velocity domestic spending into the importation of energy [and exporting of cash], it could even shrink GDP.)
Breaking windows doesn’t generally grow GDP.
The neoliberal version is basically "cost of living goes up, manufacturing of instant waste goes up, the common man gets nothing."
Degrowth without economic decline, means Carmel By the Sea in Ca, or those small towns in the Key West where only the rich can afford to live.
You can put many towns in the SF Bay Area which have actively stalled any growth. They have one thing in common: they are super expensive.
Also degrowth doesn't imply living in rural areas.