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Comment by heydenberk | Hacker News Reader

As an environmentalist, I have plenty of friends who are interested in degrowth, or even actively promote the concept. Curiously, however, none of them are interested in moving to one of the many rural counties in the US currently undergoing degrowth.

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Can you provide an example of one of these counties and why you consider they are undergoing "degrowth"? Degrowth is usually conceptualized as an intentional process, rather than economic decline.

That sounds suspiciously like "The reality of falling income sucks, but my imagination of how it might be is awesome."

Half of global GDP growth is simply population growth.

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.

> Half of global GDP growth is simply population growth.

If you double some poor saps commute that grows GDP too.

Doubling someone’s commute diverts more of their money into commuting expenses, which removes that exact amount of money from some other category of spending.

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.

I think of it more like "what if all the effort resources put in to things like making funkopops and microtransaction heavy child addiction simulations for mobile phones were used for good things. What if we weren't all forced to drive into the officeif it wasn't truly necessary."

The neoliberal version is basically "cost of living goes up, manufacturing of instant waste goes up, the common man gets nothing."

That’s an odd interpretation of the past forty years, which have seen the greatest increase in global welfare in history.

It would only be odd if you didn't know we've had 30 years of wage stagnation and continously rising inequality.

Degrowth with declining economy means Detroit. Or many other rust belt cities.

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.

Rural areas in the U.S are unwalkable (not just rural areas, but most of the U.S), not to mention probably devoid of people and community. People value community and walkability.

Also degrowth doesn't imply living in rural areas.

Rural areas are much more walkable; just stay off the roads. Some places you might want to watch for coyote.

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