Shrink the Economy, Save the World?
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Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973) by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher.
EDIT: Since this year, batteries are also cheap.
See, e.g.: https://emp.lbl.gov/queues
For intraday, day to day and up to a few days electricy storage that's fine and cheap enough.
(*) for less than half a day, in areas that are sunny, "close" to the tropics.
And arguably this is fine for the majority of the Earth's population because they do indeed live close to the tropics with 12 hrs of sunshine.
On the other hand, the bulk of the first world economies that require vast amounts of energy are pretty far north where it's rainy, cloudy, and daylight can be as little as a couple of hours in the winter.
It's not necessary to be a materialist Marxist to embrace Hickel's "mission statement" that “Degrowth is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the economy to bring it back into balance with the living world, while distributing income and resources more fairly, liberating people from needless work, and investing in the public goods that people need to thrive.”
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We also have to do more to break the myth that many of these wealthy people earned their wealth, when if any truly did it was a very exception and very small minority.
To do that, you "just" have to implement a genuine and functional democracy.
But to do that, you'd first have to realize that the one you have is not that. This part is not possible.
The answer is tighter regulation and laws, and less kowtowing to corporations and 'evil' countries.
I am beginning to think it is not possible, to put it mildly.
The way I see it, if you have an uneducated, irrational population, or being a significant portion of a population, they need to be managed. They shouldn't be having a say in everything, they are not qualified to have a say in most things. They are basically children. They're basically children.
So to get there, you need to basically eradicate that population by mandating education, and certain types of education. Those same people are going to resist, but really that's the only way, and you need to do that even if there is a cost.
On the other hand: how does one determine who is rational? Once again, you're back to opinion/consensus.
I don't think that has to be the case. There are a lot of objective standards you could apply and tests you can do.
For example, as a somewhat bad example, ask people if they trust vaccines or not, and if not why not.
Epistemology and non-binary logic are not just complex, they're counterintuitive.
However in this case, your excellent "and if not why not qualifier" could possibly save the day...but then it comes down to whether the judge doesn't get it wrong.
Not wanting to get the vaccine is not the disqualifier, but the reasons justifying that decision could be.
Truth and agreement at the abstract level where we're working right now is easy, but the move to the object level is anything but (even though it seems easy).
People of good repute with the necessary qualifications to understand scientific findings.
Really, that's it. We're mostly just trying to stop the cuckoo fox news/alex jones crowd from voting and for good reason.
Roughly 2,500 years ago two giants of ethical philosophy appeared on the scene in the form of Socrates (who can be learned about best through Plato's dialogues and Xenophon's underappreciated Socratic works) and Siddartha Guatama (I would recommend Thich Nhat Hanh's Old Path White Clouds as a reasonably unified source of his life and thought).
I know bringing those guys up probably seems sentimental, but I have lived experience with poverty, and political "realism" is only beneficial to those who have not as yet suffered the consequences of harmful patterns of behavior.
I think Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol illustrates a pretty good path for the exceedingly wealthy to become heroes, but there's this problem of sentiment, isn't there? And yet sentiment is constantly appealed to in all forms of commercial advertising!
People don't even know why or how they are here. Siddartha and Socrates' responses were basically that the answers are difficult to articulate or fathom, but the real pressing issue is how best to live life, and their answers were basically to moderate and do no harm or wrong, at least as much as possible, because the real goods are non-material, and to do wrong actually harms the perpetrator more than the victim.
every single year, young global leaders fly their private jets to their cool kids clubhouse and decide how should we, unwashed masses, live our lives. they tell us to stop eating meat, to stop driving cars, to stop owning things, to stop having children.
and the political leanings of the useful idiots who take their side are beyond ironic to me.
However, your conclusions are strange to me. Some of these seem out of left field (eg “stop having children?” IMO people are lamenting not being able to afford children and the state wants more kids)
Others are misguided. For things like “stop driving”, the arguments are usually positing that everyone needs to pay for the externalities that have long been subsidized. For example, car centric urban planning. We need to factor in all the other negative aspects driving cars brings. Additionally, car centric urban planning limits other lifestyles.
I’m gonna ignore the idiot comment and assume the best.
Good luck to you.
- Tim Jackson is a professor who seems to have spent his life in NGOs, think tanks and getting degrees of various kinds.
- "Kate Soper teaches philosophy and cultural theory at the University of North London"
- "Giorgos Kallis is a citizen of Greece, professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, publisher of over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, and an active member of the group Research & Degrowth"
- Anitra Nelson is "an activist-scholar affiliated with the Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-) at the University of Melbourne, Australia."
- "Jason Edward Hickel (born 1982) is an anthropologist and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona"
- "Kohei Saito, a 37-year-old Japanese Marxist philosopher has emerged as the movement’s public face." [Saito is an associate professor at the University of Tokyo]
The only one that isn't an academic is Liegey.
The quickest way to give these people a less hypocritical understanding of economics would be to give them exactly what they ask for, and apply some degrowth to their grant funding.
I'm going to bet my bottom dollar none of those featured in the article are flying private, nor have any political ability to limit the parent commenter in any way. Hence, not who they I think they were talking about.
It it has been at least 20 years since anyone with a brain went into journalism and the results are painfully obvious.
There is no grand conspiracy. The news is just shit.
Our education system is shit, and I find it very hard to believe that very specific things being skipped is not intentional.
there is no 'conspiracy' because it is publicly known and easily verifiable that over 50% of mass media is owned by a handful of multinational corporations and oligarchs.
the tunes they all sing are so remarkably similar, it's impossible not to recognize the persistent patterns after you listen for a while.
Trump, XI, Putin, Kishida, Modi, Joko Widodo, Han Duck-soo, Ali Khamenei, Scholz
Are all young, hip polluting global leaders.
You Sir, have become unable to accept even the most basic, easy to validate facts (unless you want to argue that somehow the handful of countries with leaders under 60 are contributing more to pollution by having their politians fly to summits)?
It's aging boomers who have been indoctrinated on infinite growth beating the laws of thermodynamics and finite resources that are dooming us.
Co2 Pollution 2024 Top List
China 12667.43 United States 4853.78 India 2693.03 Russia 1909.04 Japan 1082.65 Indonesia 692.24 Iran 686.42 Germany 673.6 South Korea 635.5 Saudi Arabia 607.91
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