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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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