The Case for Degrowth
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp
On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.
Interestingly enough, the same is happening slowly in USA and UK, and then after a big space everywhere else. Note the anti-immigration and austerity rhetoric, where what is needed is a major social change, considering of some attempts to level the playing field and prevent the current corporate and political aristocracies from emerging again.
Aa for rural drain, it's been happening everywhere, mostly because for some reason we do not pay farmers enough, nor the systems we made allow even groups of then to be self sufficient.
From 2016 to 2060, the US is expected to grow by ~80M people [0], even though a big chunk of that growth (45%) will be for people who are 65 or older.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation.
Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is).
>No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either.
"Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. And while Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, they accounted for 23% of inmates.
Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000).
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
As in, a huge majority of blacks in jails (jail population being disproportionally black).
Blacks are about 40% of the jail population and 14% of the general population.
Even if this is because blacks indeed commit more crimes, this points to the conditions blacks are forced to live (discrimination, poorly funded school districts, redlining, trouble getting loans, etc.) that force them to do so. But we also know that traditionally courts treat blacks harsher (to the point of there being special laws against blacks for most of the 20th century, from Jim Crow to seggregation laws, and of course, seemingly neutral laws used covertly with much more force against blacks, like drug laws, three strikes, and so on).
It didn't for the natives of the islands they call Nippon, either.
> They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
So did the Ainu.
(And Ainu had it better, despite the strong discrimination against them, than native americans and blacks in the US).
Even the UN says Japan is racist!! https://web.archive.org/web/20070329065052/http://www.unic.o...
People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else. Telling the Japanese what they should do is arrogant paternalism.
People are allowed to have opinions that something would be a good course of action or not. That's not paternalism.
Do this, be more like (supposedly virtuous) X and don't be Y & Z is clear paternalism and, in my opinion, highly arrogant paternalism to boot.
It’s okay to admit that the US has done immigration well. It has. There are a great many things that Japan does better than the US. We can discuss them without taking umbrage.
What's far more arrogant is you thinking your culture is so magically different that you're somehow immune to such criticisms. I wonder how the Koreans and Chinese would feel about that.
Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work.
We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.
Edit since I'm getting downvotes: I'll take a stab and hopefully someone will correct me. Do you mean a return to Mercantilism? If we can't have immigration because that is 'taking another nations resources,' then we must end up with some kind of Protectionism or Mercantilism? Or are you proposing a World Government?
That the person above didn’t bring a solution does not invalidate their statement. Immigration is only a solution for those getting the immigrants. It’s not so nice for the countries that raise and educate them without any ROI.
If somethings broken and you can't fix it, then you either learn how to fix it or you need to accept that it is broken and move onto something you can fix.
P.s. I really like the engineering analogy, but remember when discussing politics: other people have probably already defined the problem and come up with solutions. As a citizen, we need to choose which solution is best; or promote our own solution.
That's what 'export led growth' is. It just works by hoarding money as 'foreign reserves', rather than using protectionism.
The entire world can't be using 'export led growth'. There has to be net importers to balance it out. Which currently are the US and the UK - the current and previous imperial nations.
We cannot deny that there is a brain drain in many third world countries that desperately need well trained workers that is accelerated by acceptance of immigrants into developed nations like the US. Who’s going to lead these countries into better governance and economic improvement if all the talent is incentivized to leave their home countries for greener pastures?
In contrast, it would be a terrible thing to forcibly lock people into their birth countries to stop brain drain.
For example, many third-world countries had tax-free regimes for tech/services export in order to boost these industries. This made sense to them. If you made $100K contracting for a US company, you'd pay $0. But you'd also get to spend/transfer that much needed money into the economy. You'd probably also not use any of the government services because they are sub-par to what you can get privately.
Now, if you are required to pay an income tax at par to what you pay in developed countries, the whole scheme will no longer make sense. No one will agree to pay $50k and get no services in return. So you end moving to some other destination (ie: Dubai, or a western country where you pay $50k but relatively get your money's worth).
This is as close to war as it can get.
This isn't hypothetical, of course. This is how places like the Soviet Union and East Germany worked. It was policy to literally shoot people trying to leave the country without permission. On the other hand, while certainly not justifying this atrocity, there certainly has been a "brain drain" as engineers, physicians, and scientists from the former Eastern Bloc have moved West for better employment opportunities.
Perpetuating economic inequality across the world is not.
Millions have to choose between working for meager salaries in one place or move to be exploited elsewhere. They are getting the short stick both ways.
Nice strawman there.
What do you mean by this? Tokyo seems like a pretty successful case to me: relatively affordable housing even with net migration into the city, along with good public transit.
In this way, the US is like the Antebellum South, preferring servants driving their economy instead of adopting advances in tech, like the "North" in this metaphor (Japan) forced the necessity of creating.
There are a lot of immigrants looking for jobs. Billions.
This is not sustainable. This is a Ponzi scheme. Continually kicking the can down the road.
> immigration is just colonial appropriation
Thank you America for colonially appropriating me from starvation under communism.
Oh, I didn't realize I was a slave to a country. And the act of immigration which I willfully do, and the host country is pretty much hostile about, is "stealing" me. If Western countries wanted to steal me, they should not have put up such roadblocks to immigration
There's a lot of brains draining from Russia right now due to Putin's policies. Should we deport them all back to Russia?
It is a problem for a nation-state whether you assume that nation-state owns the brains of their citizens or not.
> There's a lot of brains draining from Russia right now due to Putin's policies. Should we deport them all back to Russia?
Nobody said anything like that. You should respond to what was written and not to what is in your head.
No one is denying that it’s your right to move around. It doesn’t make it any less of a bad deal for your home country. They invested in you and you left. Do this a few million times and you feel the effect.
No one is blaming you. The person above just pointed out that immigration isn’t a free lunch.
Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement.
Japan, China, Europe, Russia.
The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?)
We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain.
Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population.
Japan is just a bit ahead of the rest of us.
I suspect you may well be right but for different reasons: Societies have a life-cycle and there are quite a few of them that feel like they've passed their Zenith and are on the way down. I don't see how that can be reversed once it gains momentum and given the upside-down cost structure that we'll end up with collapse may be rather faster than how long it took to go up.
Immigration is just a shell game in this respect, though it may postpone the inevitable for a bit. Outsourcing manufacturing, food production and quite a few other critical components for a functioning society may yield short term gains but long term it isn't sustainable and the current perfect storm of war, climate change, covid and politics may well set off the avalanche.
Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.
If immigration to Japan were to increase substantially enough, most likely things would change and it would not be so easy even for professionals to get work visas.
And keep in mind that the bulk of US immigration is not of professionals, but of unskilled workers and their families. The fact that the US is able to use immigration to fill population gaps at every economic level is the main reason that it is not facing the same demographic problems that the rest of the developed world is facing.
What happens when due to immigration or rising standards the immigration tap runs dry?
The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.
Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
I've also spent a lot of time in Tokyo and it feels dramatically safer. It shows in the little things too, like how clean the streets are. I remember one time seeing someone reserve their table at McDonalds by placing their credit card on it, something which is unthinkable in any US city.
However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.
Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.
Of course then nothing stops those that have the vote because they work to disenfranchise those pensioners and other unemployed (the children will be theirs as well so are likely going to be protected).
Laws are indirectly made by those who vote!
A Ponzi scheme is a very specific type of fraud. Ever-increasing immigration to sustain a >1 worker-to-retiree ratio is more like a pyramid scheme, but one that will take decades or maybe a century to really stop working.
Is that a necessary result, or just a matter of how the economy was organized and money distributed? In other words, does politics and culture come into play in the result?
This is about social welfare and policy as opposed to "let the market sort it out".
> In 1985, there were 7 working-age people for each dependent elderly person. By 2010, that number had dropped all the way to 2.8. Moreover, it is projected to fall even further: to 1.7 in 2035 and 1.3 in 2060.
Sounds like the rest of the Western world. We're not living in such a capitalist utopia over here either, are we?
I think most of us on this forum are sheltered from how the rest of the developed world lives, with our 250k a year and private health insurance. Because from what I see here in Europe it's a temp worker world and single mothers living in almost poverty, with a welfare state close to bankruptcy.
We don't have the jobs for life, in that you might be fired out of the blue, so I don't know which is worse in this case.
Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth.
Without it the power of the wealthy over them would become a weight pressing down with such force that it would intolerable.
What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security. They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
edit: I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry.
These revealed preferences are hard to deny, and it would be quite presumptuous to impose a different trade-off on a plurality/majority of the populace.
Losing your job & health benefits for much of the middle class would be a death sentence regardless if they bought a 35k car or a 10k beater.
An emergency fund of 10k barely covers the 8k average deductible for a family. Ignoring things like rent, food, etc, all rapidly increasing.
To have a worthwhile emergency fund is too costly for most americans. Might as well finance a car - it won't matter.
"I could die tomorrow, so it doesn't matter what I do today." is not a healthy way of thinking.
Spending less, eating healthy, learning useful stuff, exercising more and building good social relations with your family, community and professional contacts are all factors that improve the likelihood of positive outcomes.
You could still die (or end up broke and sick) tomorrow. There could even be nuclear war, for all I know. Or you could rent a Ferrari, spend a week drinking, gambling and whoring in Las Vegas, and end up meeting a person at the poker table that will make you rich, but the probability is low. (Unless you're already rich or famous.)
If you live humbly and healthily from you're 20 to you're 50, you may already have saved up enough buffer that from then on, you work because you want to, not because you have to (even on a median salary). If you go on until you're 70, you probably have enough for one more generation to have a jump start on the same level of safety, if they follow your example.
Though in my experience, families who follow such values over multiple generations are already wealthy, and often quite rich. Living with dignity well within their means, and not flaunting wealth in public, are some of the main hallmarks of "old money".
The trade-off between non-existent luxury is most visible in Europe. We get small flats, mostly. The choice is between way too small inconvenient flat, inconvenient location that forces hours of commute or being already rich.
The flats these days are much less luxurious than older post-war ones, and way smaller. Then again families were even twice as big and multigenerational, but flats were even 5 times bigger. The better furnishings these days slightly help but not enough.
Then again, there tends to be public transport that works, except in USA. So maybe you could get away with a bicycle commute if your health allows it. Not quite yet in most cities though.
I wouldn’t — and there’s been times I was quite hungry while homeless.
Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.
You will have to explain how reducing growth dependence reduces agency. If anything, one could argue that there is no such thing as agency with growth dependence.
Your process of “reducing growth dependence” is fundamentally you stifling and regimenting growth.
You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.
No, neither is a fundamental right. Because both growth and degrowth as a national policy (or global international policy) has immense consequences on the opportunities and outcomes in peoples lives. Both stifle and regiment the lives and actions of people in a myriad of ways (climate change is a massive externality for everyone!), so anti-stifling arguments have no traction. The only arguments that can do real work will have to concern policy consequences: which policy yields better life outcomes in terms of health, wellbeing, longevity and so on.
>Your process of “reducing growth dependence” is fundamentally you stifling and regimenting growth.
Growth dependence is an economic force that forces people to growth their economic activity or see a depression or recession and lose their job, the threat of grow dependence makes people unable to make rational decisions, instead of thinking about their own needs people produce useless widgets and manipulate others into buying them because of a fear of losing the rigged competition. What people value isn't their productive output anymore, what they consider to be the source of their prosperity is that they are employed at all and the moment growth stops, employers are going to pile up less work onto fewer people, leaving some of them unemployed. We grow the economy to its maximum output because of full employment, so that everyone can work their 40 hours, this means we have to come up with increasingly pointless economic activity just to maintain this growth farce. In the long run this wastage of resources will shrink overall growth because long term resources are being allocated to short term needs that don't even exist and are just there to keep the economy going for one more year. If economic activity was mostly about food production, housing and other basic human needs, there wouldn't be much growth necessary to have a high standard of living, simply building longer lasting structures reduces the need for growth. Meanwhile growth dependence demands that we build houses that last 40 years and then tear them down, so that we can build them again. The idea that this is good for economic growth in the long run is laughable. The essence of growth dependence boils down to this after all: growing next quarter is really important, growing more overall over the next ten years is less important. So growth dependence isn't even an outcome, it is a dependence to make the same stupid decision over and over again. Think about it this way, over the next 10 years your economy is growing 8 times at 2% and two years at -3%. A growth dependent system will have to fake growth through inflation even in a short term degrowth environment for a single year. Inefficiencies will result in less overall growth. Meanwhile in an economy without growth dependence it doesn't matter if the economy grows or not because people get to decide how much growth they want. They don't have to fear unemployment or some other disadvantage.
>You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.
Maybe it is too difficult for you to grasp these very simple terms.
My position: Abolishing growth dependence means every single economic actor gets to decide whether they want less growth(even negative growth), no growth or more growth.
Your position: Giving everyone the choice to not pick growth is bad. You must pick growth because I said so.
This isn’t even close to what I said — in fact, it’s the complete opposite.
You can re-read my original comment, which is about others forcing their choices onto me.
That's entirely up for discussion. Civilization has imposed a lot of choices on you that you may not like.
Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?
I'm theoretically sympathetic to your wanting to opt out of public services, but it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire.
I agree with this statement. Actually, I consider this more of a principle than a right. Society should aim to minimize the degree to which it imposes the will of the government on the citizens, not fundamentally because freedom is an a priori right, but because it leads to a more peaceful society.
A society where the citizens do not tolerate would be tyrants that want to excessively dictate how people live, tends to be (EDIT) more stable, innovative or economically competitive over time.
Citizens of a freedom-loving society may not all understand this from first principles. Even if most believe they have such a right somewhat dogmatically, it may still have the same outcome.
Dogmatism may come with the downside of seeing people with different opinions as evil, though, and may sometimes lead to needless conflict.
You just said the right to not be a slave is a made-up right.
> it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire
So don’t? — but you’re losing me at the point you go from “I save money by not tracking exceptions” to “I have the right to make you participate because I want your money”.
That discussion has been settled in the West, at least for now. In many places, the discussion is still ongoing, and in fact, they are an estimated 40 million slaves (or similarly bonded people) on Earth today, or about 10x as many as in the US South in 1860.
I find it a bit funny that in an increasingly atheistic society, some Christian values are held even more axiomatically than ever before, and racism is particular
Statues of American founders get torn down due to some link to it. Imagine if everything around the world with some link to forced labor would be given the same treatment. We would have to remove almost every ancient monument or statue from Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, India, China, former Aztec and Inka peoples, just to mention a few.
Also most ancient works of writing, from all over the globe would have to be given introduction with warning that the author may have owned slaves or benefitted from slave labor.
I'm not American. I did not grow up with the legacy of American slavery. By no means do I endorse slavery, but when reading about Aristotle's ideas about slavery, I'm able to imagine a world where slavery is seen as normal. In many cases, those who lost some war would end up as slaves. But typically, that would go both ways. Whichever side won would enslave the other.
I have trouble seeing almost every inhabitant of classical Europe, the Middle East or North Africa as evil just because they either did own slaves, or would have owned slaves had they been able to.
Just like I have trouble seeing a Lion or Hyena as evil for eating a Zebra. (Ok, maybe I can see the Hyena as evil, mainly because they're ugly ;)
However, I believe that their lack of security is due to their lack of power, and that their lack of power is due to their lack of wealth, their loans and that they do not own the companies in which they work.
Consequently I see wealth and power as effectively the same and become moderately unhappy when I see policies that will in any way reduce the wealth or power of ordinary people.
So, while I used the word 'conditions' I actually meant their state of subjugation.
That's not for you to decide. The market can and does apply proper growth slowing pressure by itself.
> Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn.
That's just a different version of "think of the poor who can't eat". Countries and cultures aren't the same. Suburbia only exists due to improper distribution of business centers and housing bubbles. Overpopulated mega-cities don't have to exist with proper distribution of work and living space. Majority of countries are uninhabited and undeveloped.
> What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security.
Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.
> They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things.
Firing is necessary to keep efficiency and competition.
> Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
Who will "supply security"? People who work and who are getting paid so they buy stuff. Who pays and produce their stuff? Other people who need to work. The demand for "security" will only keep increasing due to comfort. There's a reason Bill Clinton was elected on a platform to reform the welfare system.
> We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
And flowers and unicorns too.
This is always a dubious comparison to me. Why are you poor people worried about the continued lack of atonomy you experience due to a lack of ownership in modern society? The state will give you penecilin. The duke of dorkingshire might have looked like he was doing well but he did have gout to contend with.
Also, social benefits like protection against medical bankruptcy, universal coverage, and others are known to have a net positive impact.
Without going too much in detail, the "customers" cannot have perfect information regarding the treatment or course of action that's most convenient for them at a given moment, and they cannot freely decide when (or often whether) to make use of the service or not—"It's probably best I get appendicitis now that I can afford it rather than wait until next year".
Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?
Of course, there's that ultimate hammer of greenhouse gases everybody is using daily, but besides these it is hard to confirm this. And these have also many positive externalities (access to plastics, cheap energy) that cannot be ignored, otherwise we would live in carbon-zero economy already.
I'm lucky that I don't rely on our national health service for everything but I still gladly pay towards it's running so others can use it. Of all the things the government taxes me for directly or indirectly payments towards the national health care service ranks very low on the list of annoyances.
"How American Health Care Killed My Father"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
compares the free market section of the health care system with the rest of it.
Is this the only such ladder?
And why is it that economic growth seems to be the only ladder recognised in the economic mainstream for poverty alleviation?
The latter question is one that's addressed often in the writing and talks of Herman Daly, one example I've recently come across being a 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the CASSE podcast, which discusses Daly's work and academic heritage:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-steady-stater-7232427...
A more useful framing of the question might be to assume that degrowth is a given, whether you believe this or not, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns.
The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth and absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms which notes that the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now), without reallocation.
But wealth and livelihood allocation are social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, several times.
You go to your doctor and he says take these pills they will make your body grow bigger. As the leech gets bigger you must get bigger which means you must take more pills. If you stop taking the pills, the leech will outpace your body growth and your body will suffer from anemia despite having more blood in your body than the average healthy human.
Suddenly everyone gets a fetish for being as large as an possible, it is good for your health, nobody ever questions whether they should just get rid of the leech and get their body to a normal height.
Society and economics can be best described not as a human with a leech on it, but a writhing mass of leeches all sucking each others' blood. In other words, mutual parasitism. What parts of the economy can be "gotten rid of" - as in, the people who run them being socially marginalized or worse - depends solely on what you value; rather than any objective criteria.
The historical examples of zero-growth societies are rather bleak. They were closed, feudalistic societies that relied upon strict classes with disenfranchised peasants or slaves at the bottom. This is the most optimal strategy for exploiting a static resource economy[0]. Liberal democracies are tied to economies with some level of growth to them, because there needs to be new treasure to chase in order to allow a continued changing of the guard and the deposition of elites.
[0] Related note: most historical examples of witch trials in Europe were ways to punish people with newly-acquired wealth. Zero-growth was the oxygen people breathed back then; and anyone with new wealth was looked at with suspicion. Did they steal it? Did they sign a deal with the devil?
Every individual live in something like an ecosystem. I would argue that society is part of the ecosystem for humans.
Whether or not (or in what cases) one individual should be forced to give up resources to another will be a never-ending discussion. Should government money be used for development aid abroad? For social welfare domestically? Are you responsible for caring for your parents? Your sibling? Your children? Is a mother responsible for providing her biological resources to an unborn child?
We may never come to permanent, full agreement on most of these questions.
I would put much of the finance industry in that bracket, which is essentially a rent seeking industry (albeit in various convoluted ways). It's doubly bad in finance because it sucks huge amounts of talent from areas where the individuals could actually contribute usefully.
However, historical counter-examples of zero-growth democracies are limited. We might look to the Greeks or Romans as examples of democracy in the antiquities; but there's two problems with that:
1. Their democracies were limited, with no universal suffrage and very low citizenship rates.
2. They had economic growth anyway. Rome in particular was as addicted to military conquest then as America is to oil today.
Selectorate theory[0] would argue this point in the opposite direction; i.e. that strict dictatorships squander economic growth. Political and economic franchise are inherently linked: people who cannot vote will have their livelihoods taken away from them, while those who produce the economy's goods will eventually demand political power themselves. Democracies are ultimately the means by which we distribute political power among the people, and that is itself a reflection of the distribution of economic production. If you give the people political power, the economy can't help but to grow as they are no longer being shackled.
But I think there's an even simpler argument than that. If the economy is zero-growth, then the only way for an individual to improve their living conditions is to make someone else's worse. This turns the economy into a zero-sum game of who can monopolize everything the fastest, which spikes income inequality, which makes it easier to disenfranchise voters, and eventually results in the ossification of social and political structures (since you shut up everyone that you said didn't matter).
[0] Excellently summarized by CGP Grey here: https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/rules-for-rulers based on a book called The Dictator's Handbook
Most older ladders were providing a lot of value to a few existing rulers, and concentrated the utility-allocating aspects of society in the hands of a few. And much of the value being provided was through violent seizure.
Or think about it this way, when there is no growth left, you must actually get people to cooperate with each other and as far as I know we never learned how to do that.
"r > g" societies are ones where the wealth is concentrating. This can be masked if g is positive and everyone else is also getting better off in absolute terms.
"r > (g=0)" is therefore one where the rich are getting richer in a zero sum way; because there isn't any growth, you can only make a fortune by taking it off other people.
"0 >= g > r" on the other hand looks extremely different from today: the return on capital is zero or negative. How can you invest in that environment? Negative interest rates? Negative retirement savings?
(My somewhat bleak conclusion is therefore "r > g > 0 will remain, but with increasing catastrophes that wipe out chunks of both r and g")
value is the realocation of wealth?
hmm, surely to realocate wealth has some value, but what's the relation between wealth and value?
also, what about rent? what does rent do to wealth? to growth? to value?
Why is that?
It is OK to take from the very rich to help the very poor.
All the stories I have read say that the general wealth is increasing but distribution getting more skewed.
So I do not think endless growth is the answer to maintaining the middle class
No, but it's antithetical to everything we think and believe for Capital to not take its profits before everyone else.
You might approach the footprint of a medium sized town if you built your own orbital lair and lived like a cyberpunk oligarch in space. Maybe.
Of course for some resources there is little difference at all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t eat much more than you do.
Money is not physical. Start redistributing physical stuff and you’ll find that soaking the rich barely makes a dent.
There's "rich people" buying houses, which are investment funds that buy property to rent - that is still availalbe on the market and isn't decreasing the supply of housing.
Rich people buying homes for personal use can't have an appreciable effect on pricing. You couldn't afford a billionaire's eighth home in whatever city even if it were available for sale anyway.
This piece runs about 10 pages printed, or roughly 5,000 words, which seems to challenge HN. And that's before considering that it's further discussing not one but four books, totalling over 1,000 pages.
I'd be quite interested in hearing from those who've read one or all of these, and if there were some way to invoke MacBeth's weird sisters, and agree when we three (or however many) should meet again to discuss them ... would be of interest.
There actually was a proposal for an HN book club ... 14 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067
Any interest now, and suggestions on how to structure this, would be appreciated.
HN used to have book recommendation posts pretty often, but maybe we’ve gotten less literary over time. I’ve read about a dozen books that were recommended here and they were all awesome.
Thought I'd have that discussion here as well, though.
The earlier thread addresses a number of thoughts / concerns / possibilities.
There are groups for Metafilter and Econtalk and things.
Why not set up one there and advertise it on HN and select a book and see how it goes?
Degrowth seems to me like a vision of the future that assumes that humans should remain slaves of their environment and not become masters of it. If humans are to become the dominant species in the universe, degrowth will not help.
From my reading of degrowth works the answer is: because now the global resource use induced by growth have accumulated enourmous negative externality costs, costs that will nedlessly increase further unless counteracted by degrowth policy. Food shortages, deadly heatwaves, property destruction. Direct dire costs to human health and welfare and rippling secondary effects. For example how would a scenario with hundreds of millions of climate refugees play out on top of current global political tensions?
I see the degrowth view not as "we should never ever have growth again" but rather the current modes of growth have very tangible imminent (on an astronomical timescale) negative effects that we must deal with right now. If we fail to step up to the current challenge of provisioning health and welfare for beings on this planet how likely are we to manage an all universe encompassing expansion without it ending in catastrophe on the largest scale? You could see the climate change challenge, and the degrowth plan to tackle it, as a necessary step to get our house in order, before expanding out.
Us attempting to expand into and shaping the universe is quite a task - so much could go right or wrong. I think Toby Ord's The Precipice[0] has a very useful framework for thinking about such risks.
As far as dire scenarios are concerned, I struggle with them as usually the realities play out differently. Arguably in part because people do consider such scenarios.
Seems to me it is often portrayed that way by opponents strawmanning it or by media simply very lossily compressing it into a few sentences/seconds chunks. But I'm not sure how many of the proponents really have that view. Even in cases where degrowth writers have "simple life forever!" type phrasings my impression is that that's not really the focus of their work and they're not really strongly wedded to such a vision for the long term. Their core focus is the imminent (as in 100 years) negative externalities, not the long future after that.
I think Jason Hickel is an interesting case. I've learned a lot from reading both his work and that of his critics. His "What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification" is a good intro to his thinking[0]. I think very little there is really incompatible with expansion into space in the longer term.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1...
This is precisely where we were when people first started raising alarm bells about greenhouse gases.
The thermal emissivity of the night side of earth is only one of many limits we are running head first into. Almost all scarce resources, many abundant ones, and even abstract concepts like the growth of classical computation are all hitting limits where they only scale linearly or worse with energy input.
Growing into the solar system is largely irrelevant because it's a constant increase vs an exponential and will not be meaningfully coupled to earth's economy without energy expendature on earth proportional to trade volume. And there's no compelling reason to hinge everything on the assumption that the second law of thermodynamics and speed of light are both false so nothing outside the solar system is relevant to those living inside it unless we overturn one or both first.
All of this to avoid reexamining the blind faith assumption that we have to give an exponentially growing share of the pie to those who have the biggest share. Growth is only necessary for survival of the 99.99% if every year they give 2% of their wealth to the 0.01%
Edit: "materially" in the sense of stuff. Some data from a nearby star could still be highly valuable, but exchanging stuff over lightyears might rarely be efficient.
You ask why now? The answer is because we've already overshot the ability to do everything we do sustainably with the resources available. We need to get off the treadmill now and hope like hell technology and the available buffers are enough to limit the harm to 'merely' hundreds of millions dying.
Also, for example, innovation from growing economies elsewhere can reach back to earth. Expensive stuff that relies on growth can continue to happen and the results shared.
Carrying capacity of the solar system is huge, so quite some growth to be captured there. Once it is exhausted, growth for earth and the solar system might slow down because information will have significant travel time. And we haven't even exhausted earth and earth will become uninhabitable ultimately anyway so terminal sustainability is not truly needed.
This entails growth in most primary industries also ending, as well as a large reduction in many.
This is incompatible with a system where people starve and everything breaks whenever growth goes below 2%.
"Stop giving everything to the people who already have stuff so we need the pie to grow at an exponential rate just to keep the share that goes to 99.99% of the world constant" isn't a hard concept.
GHG is bad because it produces single digit watts of forcing (captured solar heat that would otherwise escape).
Direct thermal forcing from either capturing sunlight (making the surface darker) or emitting heat from nuclear derived (or in short term, fossil fuels before they run out) sources is just as catastrophic, but further off.
We can happily replace our current energy needs with nuclear and renewable, but we're just back at square one if we don't end growth.
Countries don't decide to degrowth -- people are certainly not willing, right now, to make such decisions. Other people make those decisions and force them on people.
> but one doesn't play ball.
And why wouldn't some country play ball, if not because it's better for it to keep growing and take advantage of other countries' partial suicides?
All of this is premised on there being a current, extreme urgency for degrowth. The debates on that are hardly settled.
I do not believe the human mind can grasp exponential growth.
If compound interest is absolute then 3% interest over 2000 years is equivalent to colonizing every single planet, even the barren ones, in more than 50 trillion milkyways.
Even at the speed of light it will take 4 years to get to alpha centauri, you're not getting to the edge of the universe in 2000 years, the actually achievable interest rate must therefore be much lower than 3%, most likely closer to 0% than to 3%.
Before you argue that there will never be uninterrupted exponential growth, because of political instability and conflict, consider for a second that the inability to fulfill the endless exponential growth nonsense is the origin of the political instability and conflict.
Most growth comes from inventing new things that induce demand. E.g. computers becoming efficient enough to be in everyone's pocket means _everyone wants one in their pocket._ (and thus GDP line goes up) Thus to continuously grow we need to continuously turn the earth-matter we have available into more and more valuable things. Certainly it's not infinite, but I doubt we need to colonize another planet to keep up current growth rate for many centuries, we just need to prioritize knowledge generation (and thus inventions that increase value) over consumption. This usually only occurs during wartime, when existential threats to nations mean that knowledge generation is essential to survival.
It's like people saying buying property now is a great idea because we have 10%+ annualized inflation. Just because the CPI is >10%, it doesn't follow that houses prices will grow in an increasing interest rate environment.
System complexity. Feedback loops. Human Behavior etc.
But ultimately that does just push back the question of how to deal with flattening of the curve. Even if we settled the whole solar system ala The Expanse, then what? Solar system scale Japanese style stagnation?
I don't entirely agree that degrowth belong to the elite. I'm quite poor in a developed country and I'm for degrowth. So maybe I'm still part of the elite.
Anyway degrowth is going to create a lot of necessary poverty, which could be solved by the usual democracy to reduce that pesky inequality.
It's true that we never really reduced inequality, we just threw a lot of GDP.
There are also quite probably systemic responses, including (though I'd suggest not limited to) the emergence of global epidemics and pandemics of disease and dysfunction. Kyle Harper's recent book, The Fate of Rome, advances the case that diseases co-evolve with civilisation. This itself becomes an interesting counterpoint to the well-worn argument that science, technology, and progress have relieved humans of the evils of infectious disease. It was progress, population growth, commerce, and urbanisation which created those plagues in the first place. As Jarred Diamond noted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was the Old World with its crowded cities and vast commercial networks which introduced plagues to the New (with a very few possible exceptions, and those largely very slow-moving insults).
Though of course, diseases of the tropics were well-known. Those however are overwhelmingly zoonotic and parasite-based rather than trasmitting directly between humans, and reflect the same dynamics (huge populations and intense intercourse) though of other species, typically insects. Diseases of sanitation and hygiene, notably cholera, would be the other principle exception, though that was introduced to Europe largely from the Indian subcontinent.
Again, the point isn't that degrowth is an option to BAU, it's an option to a far worse collapse or oppressive wealth concentration with massive disenfranchisement. The fact that discussing the issue in these terms an on this basis is so readily derailed is itself among the profound challenges in achieving a non-worst-case outcome. I've pointed before to the work of William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, Plato's Revenge) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (various) before, I'll recommend them without reservation here again.
I'm not sure what it takes to degrow, but I'm pretty convinced that there's lots of fat in our consumerist lives that could be trimmed away even without changing our daily lives meaningfully.
We will likely die for the lack of philosophy.
I don't believe that one follows from the other. Humanity is part of nature. Humans are sentient, and groups of humans can decide that society and/or group systems should ideally behave in one way or another, e.g. that an economy can be organized in one way or another. Humans can also make models about the future, and make statistical predictions based upon current (sophisticated) understanding of how systems work. This sets humans apart from other organisms in nature which also operate un(or less)consciously in groups, such as ants, viruses, etc, and which have growth that is unchecked to the extent that resources permit.
Therefore, it doesn't follow that humans being part of nature implies that unchecked growth is inevitable; humanity recognizing that there are in fact finite resources on this planet which we're currently bound to, and attempting to tailor the systems which affect rate of growth to ensure sufficient runway with those resources, is a very pro-humanity thing to do. That is, some control of population and resource-usage with the goal of preventing resource and environmental exhaustion and subsequent mass calamity is a tradeoff that attempts to promote the longevity of reasonable living standards with the possible expense of some liberties and the possible reining in of some unthinking consumption patterns. That doesn't equate to misanthropy, any more than preventing a 3 year old from eating a fourth bowl of ice cream does.
Mankind is not malicious, just malignant.
You might want to build an evil AI to swallow the fly.
Yes. This is how you bring down the cost of food to get it to enough people.
I'm not convinced that it quite extends to the entire spectrum of junk food, though. Processing oreos (feel free to replace with anything else) quite so much may bring the cost down, but I doubt that it actually does anything to feed people.
Closer to home the "inflation reduction act" spends $20 billion to put farmland out of farm use, and also implement incentives to force farmers to significantly reduce production.
This will cause food shortages like it already has in Sri Lanka. Expect huge spikes in food prices like we've seen for gas.
It's possible to look at historical crop yields worldwide, including in advanced / wealthy nations, and see where economic recession or high energy (especially natural gas, the primary feedstock in nitrogen fertiliser) results in lower applications of fertiliser as well as of reduced cultivation, and consequent reduced crop yields.
Again, that's a simple market mechanisms and response to costs, not an ideologically-driven policy of degrowth, deindustrialised ag, or natural / sustainable / organic ag.
Though it is a portent of what might face us would such choices be forced upon the world more generally. This is the notion of a technology trap (also "innovation trap" or "progress trap"). See James Burke's Connections, particularly episode 1, Ronald Wright's Massey Lecture series and books, Joseph Tainter, and many others.
The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold.
While there are just 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 15 million of the country’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.
This article should give you the context and data points showing you do not have all the information
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behi...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...
As the economic crisis was already in process --- it's been developing since 2019:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%93present_Sri_Lanka...
So you're saying this did not contribute to the food shortage (a drop in domestic production of rice)?
Or you're saying this drop in production would've happened irrespective of the fertilizer ban?
1 https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-sri-lanka-is-having-an...
asabjorn's claim was that ag productivity was directly sabotaged.
That is a highly unlikely reading of a situation I see as:
1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.
2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.
3. Resulting ground truth was that ag productivity collapsed, as you note.
Again, the driver was not "let's de-grow the economy", but "we can't afford what we had". In the context of other comments I've made on this thread, what Sri Lanka are experiencing might better be interpreted as an unplanned collapse rather than a longer-term, planned, and engineered de-growth. Sri Lanka's fertiliser ban itself was a consequence, not a driver, of unplanned collapse.
The usual poster-child of the alternative viewpoint might be Cuba. That country also saw a dramatic reduction in foreign support when its patron state the Soviet Union itself collapsed. There was a dramatic and difficult period of adjustment, but the result has been a stable and sufficient existence, if not one at notional OECD / major industrialised nation levels of wealth and income.
Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
> Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.
The US has barely built refineries over the last 3 decades. This is not a new phenomenon.
> Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
Can you point this out in the bill so I can read it?
Yes it was a terrible policy to issue an immediate ban on fertilizers, and don't think organizations/ngos associated with the policy should be absolved, but there also has to be a look into where we are in terms of 'planetary boundaries' (Google it) and what it means.
That said the ESG actions is clearly correlated in the data with 1/3 of farmland laying dormant in 2021, crop losses and yield issues. Many of us won’t forget Sri Lanka was touted by WEF as a ESG poster child before it went south.
This article links to supporting data
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behi...
Shellenberger who you link to is "A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them.[2][3] Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, calling them "bad science" and "inaccurate"." (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger )
Since he describes a catastrophic reality caused directly by very real government policies, this can't just be discounted as a fabricated narrative.
De-growth people will cause mass worldwide starvation in the next 6 months, and the policies are implemented in tyrannical ways so these are tyrants and will soon be murderous tyrants.
What would happen if this was flipped and pricing per unit was directly correlated with volume (ie. more volume, more expensive per unit)? Could it work?
"society" could, on the other hand, decide to impose taxes on individuals that consume more than their fair share.
Just wondering about the impact of such structure and what would happen if businesses/people decided to use something different.
No need to have some kind of "cultural revolution"?
>Endless growth – green or not
These arguments are all the same. They take the current rate of growth, plug in a time period longer than has elapsed since the death of vitalism as a theory of life (an idea which, today, is laughable to consider), and conclude that we need to stop growing immediately.
Obviously we have to stop growing at some point. The Sun produces a finite amount of power [1], the density of the Universe is very low, etc.
Why now? The eco-pessimists never answer this question, and that is because right now is the wrong time to stop growing. This article does not attempt to address it at all, but flings a few symbols around to put on the air of rigor. Bonus points for somehow managing to use the word "decolonise". At the current rate of growth, the right time would probably be in about 150 years. But the rate of growth has actually been slowing down over the last century, and will likely continue to gradually slow, as scientific discoveries continue to become more difficult. Taking that into account, the end of growth is probably half a millenium out, supposing a huge war or other disaster doesn't set us back.
I suspect the real reason people want to advocate for the end of growth now is because everyone wants to be a revolutionary; everyone wants to make the kind of great, world-shaking advancement that Einstein or Fleming or Borlaug did. To admit that while we probably have to stop growing, it won't be for a long time — that would be sort of dull. You can't sell books about it.
1: Energy per unit time.
No, we won't. You have no evidence for this and nobody who studies the problem believes it. Furthermore, climate change doesn't work that way: the 50-year outlook is largely "baked in", and reforms made now are trying to change the 100-200-year outlook.
I'm a physicist. I have friends who actually study climate science, as in, it's their job. I have spend my entire adult life paying attention to the problem. Nobody believes the kind of things you're claiming. There's a simple graph here:
https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/
It shows that if GHG emissions drop by 2/3 in ten years and disappear in 50, we get a +1.3 C difference in 80 years (2100), whereas "current policies" is a +2.9 C change. When you reduce that to 50 years, it gets narrower; climate change is doubly cumulative (CO2 accumulates, which drives the accumulation of heat). But in practice, we expect to reduce emissions while continuing to grow the economy, thanks to renewables. The actual 50-year difference between shutting off the economy and just building some goddamn solar panels is probably less than half a degree.
I'm not here to "be convinced" by you. I'm here to, hopefully, convince you to stop derailing the debate and making my side look silly. Climate change is a problem. It is a problem that needs to be taken seriously. It is not the end of human development.
If you admit that a carbon tax would make us both richer and greener, then you're welcome to argue that on top of that we could do more.
If you can't admit that clearly, then it's just more climate denial: oh it's too expensive to fix, we have to keep giving money to Russia, because insulation and heat pumps are a hoax.
The things that will cause an explosive collapse in this scenario is shrinking population and a global shrinking economy. Debt needs growth.
It's like a mortgage on a house. It's a good deal if the house is increasing in value. It can quickly turn bad if the house is losing value.
Personally, I'd prefer to see that collapse happen but understand it would be incredibly nasty. I think most people drastically underestimate how fucked up the world would be if GDP and population fell by 1% annually for the next 10 years.
Real wealth is not financial but physical --- "the annual produce and labour of the nation" in Adam Smith's formulation (and hence a flow rather than a stock as many commentators have noted). Debt and credit reflect claims on that wealth, but not the wealth itself.
Disrupting the claim-making system does have profund effects upon distribution, but does not fundamentally affect the actual production function itself. That is, by reallocating debt, one may influence who has claims on wealth produced, but even an infinite expansion of those claims still runs into upper limits of production, that being the classic definition of runaway-printing-press monetary inflation.
There are several post-WWII articles on prisoner-of-war camp economics, often based on tokenised (though not barter) transactions based on cigarettes and other standardised items, interacting with both relief packages (generally provided by the International Red Cross) and some amount of indigenous POW-camp services (barbering, laundry, and entertainment, for example). The characteristics, benefits, and limitations of strict monetary manipulation were made clear.
As opposed to what? A carbon based life form? A monster truck?
Yes literally every thing that humans interact with that isn't constructed of atoms is a social construct. Contracts, agreements, trades, transactions. Every single concept in finance and economics. This isn't a profound statement
A debt, by contrast, is a socially-recognised and generally legally sanctioned claim on another's wealth or productivity. That is, debt is fundamentally informational, and records a relationship, but that relationship is not fundamentally grounded in any underlying physical reality. As is noted, "debts that cannot be repaid won't", and when the notional fiction runs up against such a reality, the debt is retired. That is, the information is changed.
There are numerous cultural, legal, and financial reasons to believe and behave otherwise, but ultimately, debts are a social, not a natural or intrinsic construct. Their behaviour is ultimately more a symptom than a cause of a larger growth or collapse.
Debt wants growth, but need not have it. The principle challenge is that the modern monetary system based on central banks and fiat currencies was developed in a world of rapid economic growth. It need not be limited to such a world. Currency sovereigns can both retire debts and introduce new liquidity to maintain a flow which supports commercial transactions. A major problem to date has been that new liquidity introductions tend to be to the wealth-holding classes rather than those requiring currency to pay for current and essential demand and consumption. Again, there are historical reasons for this, but they are still cultural and notional, not some underlying Law of the Universe.
(I mean, if it doesn’t it’s not for lack of us trying. I just don’t see it as something to look forward to.)
If you actually take a step back and realize that economic growth is what pays for infrastructure, social programs, public pensions, healthcare, the idea "we should just get comfortable with less" seems much less appealing.
(The article itself puts relatively little focus on this, but it's very much part of the Zeitgeist in which Solow's work emerged.)
The tune further changed in the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of the environmental movement and the first major oil shocks, after which conventional economics increasingly adopted the viewpoint not only that growth was good but that it was inevitable. I've examined the foundations of those premises for some years and consistently find that there's distressingly little there there.
How much any of this is discussed in the books reviewed I'm not sure.
Even the degrowth in japan is subsidized with growth in other regions. Real degrowth is instability, is human nature going feral back to religous roots, make many copies, fight the outsiders unbelievers, recover make many copies.
Cycling this drain, decomplexifies societies, loosing the ability to supply bureaucracy, research and experiments.
Lots of countries worldwide partially circle or circled in this loop.
One can not fix a situation, one does not talk and observe objectively. This includes disabilitys of the species as a system constraint.
People weren't prepared to put on a mask to save their own lives, they are sure as hell not going to vote for a government with policies that result in them consuming less, just so that people of the future wont have to deal with climate change. It's too far away and somebody else's problem.
Degrowth will never willingly happen in a democratic country. In my view its a waste of time discussing.
As you said, we need to find solutions to our environment problems that will make people richer, more comfortable, with more stuff.
I also strongly support taxes and regulation that prevents people from consuming more than their fair share, or passing off the true cost of their consumption to others.
I only meant to say that government policies that ask people to consume less across the board will never fly.
I disagree with this - economic growth has almost always perfectly aligned with increased energy use, however this is not a bad thing.
The history of the human race has been about moving from less dense sources of energy to higher dense ones. From wood, to charcoal, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear fission, to nuclear fusion. Abundance of energy is an absolute must for economic growth.
The good news is that what we have started to decouple our impact on the environment and economic growth.
I would also go as far as saying that economic growth is a necessity for us to combat climate change. The development of advanced technology like fusion, better desalination, higher density and more efficient farming, will all help reduce our impact on the planet.
I fail to see how this is true in any meaningful sense.
Society can combine renewable energy (which have a low per-unit cost) with dense fuel based energies like nuclear to drive the cost of energy towards 0., enabling new kinds of economic growth. For example, Proof of Work style crypto is something that's criticized = today for environmental reasons which, in that future world, would just be a siphon for excess energy. Replace crypto with "Folding@Home" style applications if you want.
The idea that you can centrally plan a strategic "shrinking" of an economy, and it will somehow end up better than the times humans have tried to centrally plan the "growth" of an economy (Eg. USSR, Cuba, North Korea, etc) is very amusing to me.
Humans are animals, and when you create scarcity, you increase the rewards to exploitation and violence. We will quickly begin killing each other and engaging in power games to get what we want under any scenario of centrally-planned artificial scarcity.
Humans are already de-growthing themselves naturally (the free market approach). Let's not screw this up by trying to engage in authoritarian central planning fantasies.
- https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/econom...
The TL;DR is "the idea that economic growth requires growth in resource use is false; rich countries have started to grow while using less and less of the planet’s most important resources."
It's worth noting that the two articles are written by the same person, Noah Smith.