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Comment by prottog | Hacker News Reader

The history of human progress is one of harnessing more energy per capita in a mighty struggle to leave behind the disadvantaged state of man in nature ("solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"). We've done quite well so far.

I'd like for humanity to keep going until the average Sri Lankan or Congolese can live like the average Texan or Swiss[0] does now, and hopefully until everyone can live in a true post-scarcity world a la Star Trek.

It's all well and good for an individual living in the developed world to freely choose to try and consume less energy, but degrowth as a whole I'm afraid would mean that the global poor stay globally poor.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use

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> I'd like for humanity to keep going until the average Sri Lankan or Congolese can live like the average Texan or Swiss does now

What if the average Texan could use 1/2 as much energy as they do now and still have a decent lifestyle? Even a better lifestyle. In a lot of ways cars are not healthy for us, for example. What if we made more of our trips on ebikes, for example? Much less energy use and a bit of exercise. I'm not sure the average Sri Lankan wants to be as obese as the average Texan - similar for rates of diabetes. I think Sri Lankans can do better than the average Texan by keeping their cities walkable (and bikeable) and not putting in a lot of car-centric development which is the norm in Texas.

> What if the average Texan could use 1/2 as much energy as they do now and still have a decent lifestyle?

Absolutely! This would be marvelous, and can happen through technological advances. Imagine if a lifted F-250 could still get 50mpg ;-)

Jokes aside, you are quite right that an abundance material wealth can sometimes go hand in hand with unhealthy lifestyles. Better to die of too much than too little, I suppose; Texas and Sri Lanka actually have life expectancies very close to each other, at 76 years and change, but in those 76 years, the Texan would have had many more opportunities at the pursuit of happiness than the Sri Lankan, enabled by an order of a magnitude higher energy expenditure per capita.

> but in those 76 years, the Texan would have had many more opportunities at the pursuit of happiness than the Sri Lankan

I'm not sure we can assume that. Sri Lankans might have much less loneliness than Texans, for example. Many of components of happiness don't require large expenditures of money or energy. The US has one of the most isolating cultures in the world - and thus high levels of loneliness. For example, many cultures have what the Italians call La passeggiata which is the evening gathering in a piazza (or similar gathering place in other cultures). People stroll around and chat with neighbors and friends in the sunnier parts of the year. It's something that we Americans tend to be envious of - we don't have this. Instead we fight traffic.

Believe me, you and I cannot be more in agreement about the isolating effects of the typical modern suburban American life, though that does vary among subgroups within the US, and "we don't have this" is not categorically true. Religious people are much more likely to report being happier (among other beneficial things), for example[0], and anecdotally I notice the same; church is a social event for most people.

But the fact remains that Sri Lankans immigrate to the US while Americans don't immigrate to Sri Lanka. This is true even for developed countries; in 2018, there were 321k Italians living in the US[1], compared to 15k Americans living in Italy[2], meaning a full half percent of Italians gave up la passeggiata to be in America, whereas 0.005% of Americans did the reverse. If people vote with their feet, they are voting for money and energy over happiness.

I do wish the average American had more access to healthy social lives.

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/01/31/religions-re...

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Italy

Sri Lankans are immigrating for money and opportunity, not for a happy social life.

People who seek happy social life tend to not immigrate to America, or often return back.

I think people tend to move where the economy is hot. The reasons are obvious: it's not fun sitting at your mum's house, while everybody thinks you're a loser, essentially because the economy is averaging negative GDP growth year on year, and nobody is getting hired.

That's mostly a social thing, not a lifestyle thing. Being unemployed in Italy (or really anywhere) is worse than having a decent job basically anywhere else.

>People stroll around and chat with neighbors and friends in the sunnier part so the year. It's something that we Americans tend to be envious of - we don't have this. Instead we fight traffic.

Another thing which I missed every time I was in the states or Canada. You can't just chill in a café for hours. You have to keep consuming constantly, otherwise the waiters start pushing you out.

In most parts of the world you don't need to pay to just exist. Of course there's the expectation that you order something. But not that you leave right away.

Libraries are pretty much the only public spaces left in the US where you aren't expected to make an economic transaction... and they're losing funding in a lot of areas of the country.

Parks

> What if the average Texan could use 1/2 as much energy as they do now and still have a decent lifestyle?

Does "still have a decent lifestyle" mean "still have just as good (or better) of a lifestyle" or "have a lifestyle that's only somewhat worse"? If the former, then won't basic economics make it happen automatically without needing to involve politics or force anyone to change anything?

I suppose a Texan could use more energy than today, if desired, and still be "greener" than today, if the energy came from a local renewable source. Let solar panels and especially batteries grow even cheaper.

Same applies to Sri Lanka; it's a very sunny place.

BTW stationary batteries can be bulkier and heavier than lithium, as long as they are cheaper per kWh stored. Such chemistries exist and are actively developed.

There's a heavy assumption in your comment that more energy = more happiness. I'm not sure if you actually believe that, or if you just haven't questioned it, but that seems untrue to me.

There's a correlation between energy expenditure and comfort, but it's less clear to me that there's a correlation between comfort and happiness.

In fact, I tend to think that too much comfort makes us unhappy in some ways. I definitely think Texans are pretty miserable in comparison to Sri Lankans.

I keep stumbling into this misconception of degrowth.

Your argument about the Sri Lankan and the Congolese is actually aligned with the degrowth movement. One of their key points is that economies of the global north should consume less so that the global south (e.g Sri Lanka and Congo) can continue to grow to support a baseline standard of living for their citizens. In other words, rebalancing the global "budget" - assuming the world actually cares to lift this people out of poverty.

Why consume less on the absolute scale? Instead, I suppose, the global South should consume more and more, so that the global North would consume relatively less.

What we should consume less of on the absolute scale is non-renewable and non-recyclable resources, like oil, or land (agricultural and otherwise), or hard-to-recycle plastics. Consuming more electricity is fine if we produce it from sunlight or even uranium and the current stockpile of "nuclear waste". Consuming more steel and aluminum is fine since they are about 100% recyclable. Consuming more wood is also relatively fine, as long as we grow even more trees (and we do).

The issue is this doesn't look toward the future. With growth, the standard of living currently enjoyed by those in the US will look pitiful in 100 years.

Any proponent of de-growth should spend a few years in countries like Sri Lanka preferably in a village without access to the last 100 years of medical tech, without access to the internet, without modern water treatment.

It feels okay to advocate for degrowth because we notoriously underestimate how much standard of living increases as a result of growth.

Trouble is that we’re destroying the planet. The current trajectory of consumption is ruinous to the environment on which we all depend. We have to do things differently.

Confusing resource consumption with quality of life is pretty asinine.

> We've done quite well so far.

The state of the planet says otherwise.

> degrowth as a whole I'm afraid would mean that the global poor stay globally poor.

...or the opposite.

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