The lefty Europeans who want to deliberately shrink the economy | Hacker News Reader

The lefty Europeans who want to deliberately shrink the economy

economist.com

18 pointspr337h4m25 comments

> It turns out voters do not much like stagnation; the newish premier, Giorgia Meloni, rails against “Greta Thunberg’s ideology” killing jobs.

What an absurd oversimplification. It does not even tackles the issue that most of the growth goes to very few people. There is also the idea that with redistribution of wealth most people will have more even with a smaller economy. But that are the kind of ideas that The Economist does not want in the mind of their readers.

> But they too readily dismiss the obvious solution, which is to green the economy, not throttle it.

The writer cannot even imagine a world where people consumes less.

All the article can be summarized as: "The system works for the owner of this magazine, do not change it".

> most of the growth goes to very few people

Do you have running water? A sewage system? Mass produced cheap clothes? Access to meat every day from an average salary? A smartphone? Access to the world information? Access to all the music ever produced for $10 a month?

What you are saying is simply not true. It appears true when you look at inequality but any technological development always benefits almost everyone. And some win a lot, but many win even more.

Almost all of us in the West are living more comfortable (and generally longer) lives than a king from 200 years ago.

Mostly yes, but I imagine in some respects no:

- Car, noise, light and general pollution. - Access to space and land. - Privacy & and in some respects freedom.

In lots of respects our life's are more comfortable, but I don't think having an iPhone makes up for having a generation that'll never get on the housing market in the UK for example.

> In lots of respects our life's are more comfortable, but I don't think having an iPhone makes up for having a generation that'll never get on the housing market in the UK for example.

You are more right that your comment. That iPhone is being used to show you more ads, track you, show you low-quality content that appeals to basic emotions... technology can make our lives better but it can also make them worse. It is neutral.

> It appears true when you look at inequality but any technological development always benefits almost everyone.

Less inequality will create opportunities for better education for millions if not billions of humans. That will improve technology in ways that just producing more stuff will not.

I do not think that to tie increased consumption with better technology is true. Most of what we produce is low tech stuff like fast fashion. I will argue that producing less and having more time for leisure will also increase scientific output.

So, economic growth is not the same that technological advance. And that is one of the points of the "lefty Europeans": economy measurements are not tied to human advancement and well being but just money.

Economic growth is also not linked to resources use. You can have growth while using less resources, or shrink the economy while using less. This is why the whole movement has always felt weird to me. You can have forever growth while using 0 resources and lowering consumption, because as you say growth is a monetary phenomenon.

> You can have forever growth while using 0 resources and lowering consumption, because as you say growth is a monetary phenomenon.

So, at least we agree that GDP is a bad measure and we need to come up with something better that takes into account more things that just amount of money.

Better redistribution would last a very short while to provide 'more growth' and ironically that is the big canard. 'Equitable' distribution is not the objective - what we want is 'distribution that creates the most growth' because by far and away, the later is what will make the most, the wealthiest.

It's probably not optimal for example for everyone to have the same amount of assets. Most assets are not unproductive, and the people managing them are 'doing stuff', Musk, though says some ridiculous things in Twitter, is still making Tesla and SpaceX. It's better if we give him some money leaway.

Second, I can absolutely assure you that all people want growth at least for the coming very long while.

There is an infinite demand for healthcare services, especially as we age, we are in a perennial system of rationing and 'growth' will help there. We all want to travel more, to have more leisure, and frankly nobody enjoys cleaning up after themselves.

We are nowhere near an age whereupon regular folk want to consume less.

In fact, the tone of your comment suggests that you're caught up in the mythology of 'less growth' as though that would mean 'less plastic in the ocean' or something like that.

>The rudimentary machine crunched the data and spouted a grim answer: given ecological constraints, the highest standard of living possible was one stagnating at half the American level of the time. Anything beyond that risked imminent disaster, a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity”.

Given our climate mess, and increasing economic and resource fighting mess, they weren't that far off. Of course we did went over it, bringing this to non-sustainable levels...

"At a three-day “Beyond Growth” conference held at the European Parliament in Brussels this week (and organised by 20 mainly left-leaning MEPs), an audience of youngsters whooped and cheered as speakers proclaimed that, this time, the limits of growth really have been reached. Driven by ecological concerns and riled by social injustice, to them the question is no longer how to mitigate the effects of human activity, for example by investing in green technologies."

Not just regular MPs, it gets much, much worse:

Von der Leyen: https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1658022320827518977

The president of the European Parliament: https://twitter.com/timparrique/status/1658009279754915840

Palling around with Hickel and Vandana Shiva:

https://twitter.com/ERC_Research/status/1657835551901270023 https://twitter.com/ICTA_UAB/status/1655860218868252672 https://twitter.com/AndreasShrugged/status/16583961046254632...

The tone of the article is so condescending it makes me think of the Don't Look Up movie. The same point of view could have been developed with more respect to people's fear of what is actually happening.

Indeed the actual point of the article seems to be: don't look at the limits-to-growth model's actual amazing ability to have put curves on a graph that 50 years later we are still following. Look at that one line that's still been going up for 50 years in reality (and is also going up in the model...) Then the "economist" chortles: how wrong could this model be, haha, hear hear!

Was this the same Limits to Growth model that, when run backwards, predicted the world's population was infinite sometime in the mid-1800s?

I don't think any of these models have been able to retrodict successfully.

No? The limit to growth use World3.

Apparently they believe that the Malthusian growth model is right this time around, and they have some ideas about what to do next.

> [S]ome form of “de-growth”—décroissance, in the original French—is necessary today to avoid societal collapse.

And how do they mean to implement this?

> “We need to determine democratically what kind of production we need to be doing,” and nix the rest, one participant advocated. Panels of citizens can advise what is wasteful and what is socially desirable.

Oh.

I feel like that economic model has already been tried.

I feel very pesimestic about the whole situation. Shrinking our economy will obviously hurt standards of living massively, but it also seem inevitable. I also wonder how this will affect society. Lefties seem to think we will live as hippies or enlightened Soviets, but it seems more likely that we will regress into conservative authoritarianism. The only hope we have is that we continue to innovate and learn to do more with less.

Does installing insulation in homes "grow" or "shrink" the economy?

What about cars with better mpg?

Efficiency is great but it's hard - going from 20mpg to 40mpg is twice as hard as going from 10mpg to 20mpg. Efficiency gains are frequently trade off gains - in the best case scenario you're giving up something you don't need for something you want; sometimes though what you don't need now and what you don't need in the future are two different things.

I'm not knocking any of that but I think we should be clear eyed about it. Further there are alternatives to efficiency - increasing the absolute amount of energy produced for one. That comes with problems obviously but it also opens up a lot of possibilities that increased efficiency does not.

Just look at the UK, people cheering at their own economic failure. Perfect example of a country in practice. And don't mean Brexit.

Who's cheering what? Everyone I know is struggling.

Of course they're struggling. I have lived there before. It isn't a surprise they are struggling. There is no want or even belief of better life, comparative to other places. Ideology wins.

Brexit isn't exactly helping improve their economy. The regular people were promised a better future by economic and political elites like Nigel Farage, it's truly a shame how they were being lied to. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes a whole generation before things start improving, but hopefully for them it'll happen sooner than that.

This is exactly the issue. I've lived in so many places but have never just seen people in the UK complain about their lives and not want better for themselves.

Regardless of Brexit, Covid, Wars, other countries seem to just get on fine and people in them want to get better lives. And with far less they seem to do much better and be happier - and want to grow more.

Your comment illustrates this. Try getting the same comment out of Australia, Japan, India, Germany, Uganda, Canada, the US. You could name any country and more people are stuck with malaise in European countries than I've ever experienced.

Self inflicted imo. If a Brit person spent any time living overseas they'd come to their senses and see actually things are better than most places.

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