The 19th-Century Family Fortunes Funding Degrowth | Hacker News Reader

The 19th-Century Family Fortunes Funding Degrowth

effort.news

19 pointsbarry-cotter26 comments

Degrowth is such a stupid idea. All the things that make your life better - housing, healthcare, education, food, iphones, air conditioning, cars, and more - are forms of wealth.

You cannot have more of them without economic growth, because these things are economic growth.

But economic growth fails to model externalities. All that stuff is good, unless we cook the earth using it and kill everyone. iPhones are great for us but what about the kids dying the lithium mine? …

Probably not popular ideas on this forum, but they also can’t just be dismissed (but they will get downvoted lol).

A single carbon tax would be a market-oriented solution that captures the externality of CO2 emission - and would likely still permit economic growth! You don't need to revolutionize the entire basis on which human civilization has acted for millennia in order to solve the problem. And if you did have to, one could reasonably expect that effort to fail.

That’s one single variable out of near infinite externalities. Other examples: collapsing the food chain by wiping out critical pieces through urbanization, microplastics poisoning all animal life (potentially), global warming due to heat capture of asphalt… Some of these may have solutions, some might not be problems but what’s definitely true is that “growth = good” is way too simplistic a model.

I think there's a middle ground between laissez-faire capitalism and degrowth. As far as I can tell no one in this thread has been arguing that laissez-faire always produces great outcomes, simply (and rightly) that degrowth is a horrible idea.

I’m talking about our existing economy, not laissez-faire. These externalities are not modeled in it.

> simply (and rightly) that degrowth is a horrible idea.

I don’t agree that it’s this clear. If growth is happening mainly for the rich (which it currently is), then I fully support de-growing them.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1qcy40d/growth_in_u...

It's nice to be wealthy, but growth is happening for everyone. But as an overarching point, you appear to be arguing against a strawman. No one as far as I can tell in this thread is arguing for the status quo, especially regarding climate policy. They're just arguing against the notion that humanity's lot can be improved by nuking the economy in order to save the climate.

I understand that it is a lot more boring to discuss measured market interventions than eating the rich (incidentally, how will eating the rich solve the environmental problems of urbanization?). But it will be a lot more productive assuming one's starting goal is truly the environment rather than eating the rich.

I mean those charts don’t pass the sniff test. Being healthy (or sick for that matter!) was basically free, now it costs over a thousand dollars a month in insurance. A huge chunk of most people’s income.

Same with housing (and education): https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-...

Is it fair to say that you're more interested in discussing wealth inequality than environmental policy?

Degrowth touches both subjects. Billionaires for instance are top polluters. Leveling resource distribution would prevent that.

good luck making that happen. They are rich because they are highly capable (or their ancestor was and they have enough money to hire as many highly skilled poors as they need to enact their goals). They will find a way to push your attempts at degrowing them mostly onto the poors without structural changes to the market place. This doesnt mean what you think either. It means breaking up the companies they control that have large market power until they are small enough to not have much market power and there is an opening for more entrants to diffuse the market power causing market shares they held previously. Degrowth is a seperate, stupid idea, that will shrink the pie making everyone worse off. Even if manages to decrease the wealth gap slightly, the massive drop in quality of life from the pie being smaller will overwhelm that benefit.

And forest fires burning down whole towns, pandemics, drought, crop failures, social unrest due to hungry people trying to move to more livable areas are externalities that economic growth can also solve, right?

Degrowth is simply a refusal to engage in magical thinking. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet: growth must therefore have an end. Would we prefer to choose a gentle mode of deceleration which keeps us comfortable along the way, or would we prefer to wait and do all the decelerating at once, when we hit the wall?

We are nowhere close to thermodynamic limits. Another 100x or even 100000x growth is entirely possible.

We aren't even using 0.01% of the solar energy that hits the Earth's surface, let alone what we could capture with possible future technologies.

There are challenges to growth, like climate change, but we can engineer solutions instead of throwing our hands up and going home.

It sounds like you agree with the premise, then, that there are planetary limits, and that growth must ultimately end: you are simply looking at different limits, and you see a lot of runway left. People who are looking at ecological limits tend to have a less optimistic view.

No one says literally infinite growth. That's a stupid strawman and if you are arguing at that level you are not engaging, you are just playing tribal in-group signaling. And we don't need to think about growth 10,000 years from now, we have no idea, not the slightest clue, what the technological, cultural, and human landscape looks like in the timeline long enough to actually start having to think about the edge of growth

There is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, to think we are nearing the end of genuinely useful growth. We still die early of cancer, spend too much time working, live in too small domiciles, don't enjoy enough hobbies, eat worse food than we'd like, etc. We are nearing catastrophe because of our carbon-producing energy sources, but that's not "growth" generally, that's a specific problem.

> No one says literally infinite growth.

The previous poster said "degrowth is such a stupid idea", which amounts to the same thing.

> We are nearing catastrophe because of our carbon-producing energy sources, but that's not "growth" generally, that's a specific problem.

That is only one of many ecological limits we are approaching, or which we have already exceeded.

> You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet: growth must therefore have an end.

Per capita (real) income has over doubled in California since 1975, and yet the per capita energy use has stayed the same (see "Art Rosenfeld"):

* https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/01/27/art-rosenfeld-californ...

Economic growth does not (just) entail making more stuff, especially in the US, when so much is "services".

Degrowth is for other people, not me.

The extreme degrowth almost seem like a climate-disinformation psyops because it's so stupid. Like I'm more convinced they're propaganda to discredit climate action than actually trying to fight for it.

I have to remind myself that more likely, people have just no idea what "economic growth" means and develop some strawman definition based on basically no background understanding.

This is flatly wrong and why so many people still seem to think that 18th century economics cannot be improved upon.

Degrowth doesn’t mean making people less wealthy. It means consuming less overall and not mandating growth as an objective in itself.

There is usually no scarcity of housing. People are homeless because houses aren’t efficiently distributed. We don’t always need more buildings, we need better use of the homes we have.

Infinite growth in a finite system is absolutely the dumbest way to plan and the reason we are pushing the climate into unknown territory.

I've never heard of this.

Degrowth is an academic and social movement, predominantly in Europe, aimed at the planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption as a solution to social-ecological crises. Commonly cited policy goals of degrowth include reducing the environmental impact of human activities, redistributing income and wealth within and between countries, and encouraging a shift from materialistic values to a convivial and participatory society. [1]

Seems like it goes against human nature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth

Well, it makes sense for them. If everyone is to get a better life, the planet will burn, and they won't be able to enjoy it. And they're already wealthy, so as long as everyone else stays where they, are, things won't have to change for them.

Another story are developed societies where there's enough resources and infrastructure for everyone to live a decent life already. They can genuinely focus on sustainability, not on growth.

Fascinating to see people getting so triggered by the idea of slowing growth.

Degrowth is about reversing growth, not slowing it. A decrease is a reduction, not a slowing. It’s about reversing the sign, not changing the first derivative.

Brian Chau, the creator of Effort News, is a "Founding Faculty" member (https://www.fromthenew.world/about) of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School, and has lived in its Singapore-based compound.

Srinivasan's Network School is part of his long-term goal of creating "Network States" -- essentially an aspiration of corporate feudalism (https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-tech-barons-have-a-blue...)

See: https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-net...

>“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

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