This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.
> even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'
Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.
Yeah, I can see why degrowth looks extreme to you. It must be rather frightening to lose your sense of control, comfort, and purpose in an unsustainable path.
To me personally? It’s fine. I work fewer hours than I did a decade ago, and generally travel and consume less than I did then too.
The wealthy can do with degrowth fine since degrowth implies deflation. The wealthy were doing fine before the agricultural revolution, too, for example.
Whether it will happen "naturally" because of climate catastrophes and war, or whether we will somehow understand this and do something before it's too late, I can 100% assure you that the world economy in 2100 will be smaller than today.
I can't assure you that the moon or the planet Mercury will exist in 2100, because 75 years is much too far ahead to forecast if we do or don't get e.g. von Neumann replicators by 2040 years and spend the next 60 using them to disassemble either or both into a Dyson swarm.
As you say, this is simple.
Growth doesn’t require increasing use of finite resources. A more-productive widget can (and generally is) less material intensive than its predecessor. The material and even energy intensity of GDP has been falling in the developed world for decades. Value is subjective; its substrate isn’t finite. A world of artists producing digital works could be incredibly materially unintensice, but still feature growth, as an absurd example.
And sure, there's room for now, but 3%-year-on-year growth halves the remaining gap to whichever limit is critical every 24 years. I'm not at all clear how close e.g. current computer tech is to the Landauer limit, but it is definitely still developing much faster than 3%-y.o.y.
For truly infinite growth, we'd have to find a way to make mass and dark energy in balanced quantities — that would allow us to have not only arbitrarily more actual stuff, but also make sure it doesn't then collapse into a black hole.
The biggest benefit is far more people can actually afford a life of property ownership in these cities. Look at what 250k buys you in these places vs the places that didn't experience a degrowth period. We are talking a complete 4 bedroom home outright vs a 10% down payment on a comparable home.
This might seem perverse why it could be beneficial to experience degrowth. But the answer to that is simple: no where actually accommodates growth sufficiently to keep costs from going out of control. So a degrowth period really means prices are no longer being significantly influenced by an ever incoming class of high income earners, but are more in line with the actual median incomes found in the area.
Do they work without subsidies from the growing parts of the country?
And what is even the subsidy? Interstate road works? Hardly matters to your daily life. The other subsidies are probably things like welfare benefits or medicaid, which might be a significant thing in your daily life if you qualify but if you don't are also irrelevant.
Lower property prices on the other hand lift all boats. Renters benefit. Homeowners benefit. Corporations benefit. At every income level in the market.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-federal-aid-r...
I really don't think subsidy is a factor in keeping things cheap in terms of cost of living. I think it is pretty solely due to the relationship between the size and rate of growth of the local high income demographic and housing inventory. For example it is even cheaper to live in Mexico due to this relationship, and there is probably a lot less subsidy going on there.
Sure does if you want trucked vegetables in the winter!
> think it is pretty solely due to the relationship between the size and rate of growth of the local high income demographic and housing inventory
The American housing market is broken. You are absolutely correct in that shrinking Rust Belt cities sidestep this problem by being in the rare position of housing surplus.
What I’m challenging is the notion that life in those cities would be as nice as it is if the entire country copied their population and economic contraction.
It's not nonsense. In overwhelming majority of cases GDP is tied to energy consumption. We have not yet learned how to decouple it.
With renewables, there is faint hope, but the transition is slower than we would ideally like. It also remains to be seen what % can be decoupled by pure solar and wind (hydro is already tapped out, mostly).
> Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.
So is growth at any cost.
Yes. It is. We deeply regulate growth in every economy.
That's entirely dependent what % of the planet we feel like tiling in PV; wind is ultimately solar powered, and there's more places we can usefully put PV than wind anyway.
Environmentalists will be Very Unhappy if we tile the Sahara with something as close to black as PV is; but that location alone (we have more deserts), using middling quality PV (20%, we have stuff more than twice that good), and the current global average capacity factor (13%, but it's a good latitude and could plausibly get 23%), would still be 11.8 times current global primary energy demand, which itself is 6-7 times current global electricity demand.
> hydro is already tapped out
As a source, yes; as storage, no. I only mention this because it's very easy to mix them up.