>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.
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.