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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

De-growth means “increased poverty” for most of us, I really hate this double-speak.

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.

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With inflation and increasing inequality I'm already living a more "impoverished" life than my parents when they were my age, yet economic growth has been out of control. I don't think your vision of "most of us" is at all connected to reality.

> I don't think your vision of "most of us" is at all connected to reality.

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...

> 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.

I would need to make at least 50% more income than my dad at each stage of his life for this to be true.

The de-growth is mostly targeted at the up and coming demographic behemoths of India and China, maybe also Africa as a whole. It’s the West’s way of telling them: “you can’t be like us, that would be bad for the planet”.

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).

Most recently Latin America too, as academics from the UK, France and Spain want to make us believe.

I'm sorry but this is a misinterpretation of the degrowth thesis. The proponents behind degrowth (i.e Hickels, Kallis) are constantly correcting this misinterpretation. Degrowth stipulates that the global south actually needs to continue to grow to reach important indicators associated to the quality of life of their citizens.

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/

Do you expect that people in the global North will voluntarily accept degrowth, or will they vote out politicians who try to force it on them?

I didn't come up with the degrowth thesis myself but I will entertain the question even if you've answered it yourself.

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...

You haven't answered the question. In democracies, people don't necessarily vote the way you might consider sane and civilized. There is very little precedent for people voting to lower their living standards.

I think the impoverishment varies. We have much better computation, telephony, medicine and many other corners of society. The poverty appears when you measure things that must be shared, like living spaces in a major city. Apartments in NYC are dramatically more expensive. In general, the population growth means that we have to share more and that often looks like poverty. What? A four bedroom home can't be purchased by a teacher on a single salary the way it used to be? That's because so many more people are around.

> With inflation and increasing inequality I'm already living a more "impoverished" life than my parents when they were my age

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.

Not relative to cost of living.

No, it has. That is the definition of “real” income.

It would help if this didn't read like two people saying what amounts to "yes!" "no!" at each other. Perhaps if you offered some actual number crunching somewhere or a paper, the invested reader could figure out whether agreeing with you makes sense.

There is no paper or number crunching involved. All one has to do is google "real median household income united states" and click on the first link.

Leaving aside the issue of search bubbles, the first link I find states that the real median household income in the US was "below 1999 levels until 2016". That doesn't support your point at all.

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.

It doesn't necessarily mean more poverty. It means converting to an economy that focuses more on health care, both mental and physical, education, increased efficiency, and more sustainable design and technology instead of just more stuff.

Continued growth is perfectly possible.

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.

When governments charge too much for waste, people respond by illegally dumping their waste to avoid disposal fees. Waste reduction is good, but there are limits to how far you can push it.

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.

I agree with everything but your first sentence. You didn't say infinite growth is possible but is continued infinite?

Well we've got a world of 7 billion people.

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.

Well capitalism is all about price signals. If you can price it, it can be optimized.

Isn't there a theory about how people do poorly when they grow up poor? Then you've got degrowth which says more people should grow up poor.

Relative poverty (social exclusion from economic activity) is more important than absolute poverty (low level of consumption).

Desired degrowth actually has a name: sobriety.

OT, but: Wellcome! So on the left side, the 'Greens' wanting to prohibite all fossil-powerded-burning-motors, in the hope, (newton...spectrum of light) water is less reflecting sunlight than green plants, so more (sea-) waters may steam up to rain down somewhere, letting more green-plants grow, those reflecting more sunlight... and on the other side, i learned in school that there must be some kind of dirt in the air that watermolecules sum around building heavier 'drops', rainig down when they gained enough weight. And the 'academics' (oder "Inselbegabte") are brabbling about, 50y by now ? ^^ -non native english speaker, sry.

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