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.
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.
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 ;)