Examples of Post-Growth Practices | Hacker News Reader

Examples of Post-Growth Practices

postgrowthguide.notion.site

23 pointslaurex20 comments

For post-growth to go mainstream we will need drastic regulations and control, think of "Fit for 55"[0] rules but more dystopian. Post-growth isn't compatible with capitalism or human greed.

I hardly see it now in the world where people thrive for FI/RE by stashing tons of savings on ETFs and expecting them to grow forever but not really caring how that growth impacts the society and the environment. I don't know any system in history which sustainably condoned greed without victims.

To be honest I don't see the way to fix the global "growth" problem. I am afraid the nature will be fixing it as usual with cataclysms and famines.

[0] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/green-deal/fit-f...

I guess the whole 'post-growth' thing is supposed to be counter-cultural, but I think it underestimates how much of business today is bullshit jobs, criminal extortion, monopolies, cartels, busywork, rent-seeking and net negative value destruction.

We're literally paying people to do stuff that makes all our lives worse. Thats not pro- or anti-growth, it's just stupid.

Degrowth (or post-growth, I guess) is unnecessary and harmful as far as I can tell.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degr...

The degrowth folks are used to the critiques ( https://twitter.com/timparrique/status/1430155819404963841/p... ) and have responded to Noahpinion's piece: https://timotheeparrique.com/a-response-to-noah-smith-is-deg...

I'm sure are aware of the criticism and have a response, but that doesn't tell us whether their response is compelling.

> His main idea, exposed in The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), was that economic organisation is a continuation of biological organisation. Why? Because all machines are necessarily made of materials and use energy, and because all labour involves our biological bodies, which are also made of materials and use energy. The economy is – unavoidably – a bioeconomy, which means it is a subsystem of the larger finite and nongrowing ecosystem that is the Earth.

The problem with Georgescu-Roegen's bioeconomy framework is that biological systems are highly constrained in the degrees of freedom they can change in the short run versus the long run. Whereas the global economy as conventionally understood can change much faster after a relatively brief period of time. It's the type of metaphor that obscures more than it reveals I think.

My intuition is that if you did a lifecycle analysis of things like more modular and repairable phones (or I guess jeans), it would be pretty likely that it would be environmentally worse because you're using more materials for added interfaces, connectors, which adds more weight for shipping and therefore fuel, etc. Compared with the amount of people who will actually benefit from DIY repairability and modularity.

The site layout combines PowerPoint with semi-infinite scroll. Ouch.

Well, let's start the list.

- BearMade - Makes 25 "natural" backpacks a week. Virtue signalling.

- LitePhone - Overpromoted low-end phone. Virtue signalling.

- FairPhone - repairable phone. Expensive. Virtue signalling.

- iFixit - repair manuals. Reasonable enough. Much like Chilton's car manuals.

- Swapfiets - bicycle leasing. What's special about that?

- Slow - coffee. 20% lower productivity due to better farming. Virtue signaling.

- Open Collective - some kind of fund raising scheme.

- Kaffe Bueno - more coffee, with medical claims.

- Planetary Impact Ventures - funds brewer spent grain recycling into human food. Virtue signaling.

- Mud Jeans - leasing of jeans. Virtue signaling?

- Kruse Vask - small family-owned laundry. Routine small business.

Not seeing much of interest here.

How are you determining what is "virtue signalling" as opposed to, say, virtue?

It's not clear to me whether you mean (1) the companies are virtue-signalling or (2) the purpose of their products is so that their customers can virtue-signal. Maybe 1 in some cases and 2 in others?

In any case, I don't quite understand why signalling virtue is considered -- as it seems to be -- worse than signalling wealth or conformity or nonconformity. I quite like living in a world where one of the things people commonly want to advertise is virtue, even if sometimes they advertise virtue they don't really have or virtue that isn't as valuable as it looks.

(In my more cynical moments I think that calling things "virtue signalling" is itself mostly a form of signalling. Sophistication-signalling or something of the kind. And like other forms of signalling, sometimes the signals are honest and sometimes not.)

Grain waste products left over from commercial brewing and distilling operations are already sold to farmers as animal feed. It isn't thrown away so recycling it into human food is mostly pointless.

We're going to Mars, we're going to conquer the solar system and beyond. We're going to have human populations at record levels.

It might be hip / cool to degrowth but as others have pointed it's unnecessary and after reading the link, seems more marketing than substance.

Almost all of the things on this list are just growth.

If you take all that we have on the planet now, and then make one thing, just one thing more out of raw resource than recycled, that is growth. If you have one more person, that's growth. If you build a house or apartment anywhere without getting rid of an old one, that is growth.

Capping production is not non capitalistic, it’s literally standard practice for luxury goods.

I don’t understand what they mean when they say “non-capitalistic”.

> 12b · What's non-capitalistic?

> Its method is regenerative agriculture without using pesticides and fossil- based fertilizers while growing plants only - a gentle way of farming.

Probably "we do not strive for growth in the farm's output". However, I'm not sure these people understand how much more expensive food would become without pestizides and fertilizers.

Degrowth means literally to be poorer than today. Personally I am okay with that, but we should not hide it.

What a missed opportunity. Imho Capitalism should be understood as "a system where the size of your capital determines the actions in society", which is undoubtedly where we are. Some financial actors have become so large they can buy a significant share of a company and effectively dictate what they want them to do. And they don't even need their own money. They are using _your_ money.

It is your money inside pension funds, or index funds which large financial institutes can use to get more influence throughout the economy. And you can thank private equity for the hollowing out of the housing market or medical care sector.

There is this subreddit called capitalism Vs socialism and they can't agree on the definition for capitalism. It's in the name. The people with a lot of capital are the ones in charge and making the decisions and the general expectation is that capitalists only hand over capital for a return.

A post growth economy needs investors who are okay with only getting back what they invested and nothing more.

Well, by that definition, the opposite of Capitalism is Democracy.

>> A post growth economy needs investors who are okay with only getting back what they invested and nothing more.

I would love this to be true, but I'm afraid you cannot change the psychology of the people like this.

You could argue that ESG is already nudging companies into this direction. But now you have directed capital flow for non-standardized goals. It is still outside of democratic control and under control of the largest cooperations on earth.

There are tabacco companies which have an ESG score higher than Tesla...

The problem is not the growth. Is the increasing wealth discrepency. "Too big to fail" should be "too big to exist".

And no, I am very anti-marxist.

Modern regenerative agriculture involves animal husbandry, not just plants. Most such farms are capitalist enterprises. As usual with this sort of twee opinion piece, the author has no clue how things work in the real world.

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