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.
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.
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.
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”.
Which is my point: you’re not differentiating between the two, while asserting that you don’t have the same rights in one case.
Slavery was also the law.
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.
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 ;)
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.
Degrowth as used in the OP article is about macro level policy. For example solar panel subsidies, taxing coal and investments in public transportation.
Individual actions performed in the name of "growth mindset" (whatever that means) can like any other actions be stopped, and likely will be stopped if they cause harm to others.
In capitalism, these are entrepreneurs. In democracy, these are politicians. In autocracy, these are dictators, army generals. In theocracy, these are pharaos, etc. In nature, these are alpha wolves.
Even people proposing degrowth, if they're going to achieve their goal, will have to be power hungry, alpha wolves (no matter how they will market themselves), not that different from people I describe. And they will have to fight constantly. There is no way how to stop need for getting better, getting more, competing, winning...
>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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Here take this pill and boom life extension is on a different level than this is my carrot and even though I have 100's you can't have any.
The first will lead to bankruptcy the second to riots.
The most bizarre argument I've encountered yet.
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?
Where have I come even close to suggesting it would? Perfect information, to the extent it can be possible, is a requirement for a market to be efficient. What you call "socialist medicine" is by definition not a market, so perfect information is a moot point.
What universal healthcare can provide is the adequate incentives for providing early diagnosis, promoting preventative medicine, and giving safe and effective treatment. Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?
Furthermore, pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line, and who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered. This already happens to an extent under the current U.S. model. There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.
This is simply not true, as I said, risk factors into every price.
> Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?
Don't you feel any incentive to take care of yourself with early diagnosis and prevention?
> pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line
Just like if you're hungry. But food in a free market is cheap and plentiful.
> who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered.
The beauty of the free market is the consumer gets to decide who to trust.
> There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.
The US had a free market in health care up to the 1960s, and there's no evidence of the dark predictions you make for it.
So I compared it to communism.
If you have something else to compare it to, feel free.
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.
Also, social benefits like protection against medical bankruptcy, universal coverage, and others are known to have a net positive impact.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.