Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

> Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth"

I don't understand if you're making a larger point or not, but the "first world" is the focus of the discussion of whether or not growth economics is harmful. It worked fantastically well for the first world for many years, possibly even the 200 year scale that the commenter above challenged. The issues have arisen in the last 50 years (opinion incoming) and particularly since the US, and UK embraced the Trickle Down model that Reagan pulled over the American people's eyes.

Western Civilisation spent some 600 years taking their freedoms from those who held them down -- the politically, and economically, elite. In 8 years President Reagan convinced the American people that these overlords no longer needed to be held account for taking the bulk of the wealth of the masses for themselves, on a promise that it would come back to them, and that this was a required measure to encourage growth of the economy as a whole.

This was a bald-faced lie, wealth-capture and the chasm of wealth inequality was at an all time low in the developed world circa 1970, the last 50 years have served only to restore the land- and robber-barons to their political city on a hill.

They used the oldest tools in the despots handbook to achieve this: propaganda and agents provocateurs.

Today it is easier than ever for the political class to deploy these weapons against their citizens (whom, by the way, should be their peers in a democracy), and to obfuscate the use of these tools from those worst affected.

So with farming and animal husbandry water rights are a big thing. Often water rights will go to farmers/ranchers long before they go to people.

So you've got cows, with a conservative estimate, using 500 billion gallons of water a year in the U.S. alone just for drinking. Obviously most of that is coming from natural sources but that has financial impacts on the treated water that ends up pumped to your house/business via pipes. How big is that financial impact? shrugs

I highly doubt it's close to 50 billion USD a year though.

They definitely do get comparatively obscene amounts of financial benefit though. Water rights, forage disaster, livestock compensation, indemnity payments, feed assistance, general relief, then you have to think about what sort of subsidies the growers get that then gets passed through as a benefit in the price of the feed going to the livestock...

Man I love meat, I love love love meat, but I switched to primarily whole food plant based last year. WFPB is far more sustainable as far as water and land, arguably much healthier, requires far less fossil fuel input, and noticeably cheaper (my weekly grocery bill as halved).

It absolutely should.

https://newrepublic.com/article/120915/american-west-drought...

- 90% of of Nevada's cropland is used for hay, 90% of Montana's, 60% of Utah's

- 50% of California's water usage goes to livestock feed

Etc etc. This is unsustainable, period. This is causing groundwater depletion (and has for decades) that will take centuries (or longer) of rainfall to replenish. You get water contamination, you get monoculture crop for vast swaths of land that negatively impact wild pollinators and soil health, etc etc.

I love meat, but it absolutely HAS to be a luxury. My fiance's parents and siblings mostly own livestock. For personal use for a few dozen of them they have a couple hundred acres which does not sustain their animals and requires considerable amounts of purchased feed for a dozenish cows, a couple dozen sheep/rams, a few dozen chickens etc in the heart of Missiouri.

Depending on where you are in the world you need 2-25 acres of arable land per cow during the warm seasons to feed themselves. The average grass fed cow will yield about 530lbs of meat at slaughter after 2 years of life.

That's 4-50 acres tied up for 2 years to produce 530lbs of meat, less than 3/4 of meat per day.

If you switch them to grain you need about 25 pounds per day of dry feed. In the corn belt you can get about 200 bushels per acre. A bushel is about 56 pounds. That gives you 1.13 years for a cow with optimal yield per acre of corn, outside of the corn belt you'll only get about 100 bushels per acre yielding you about 0.61 of a cow's annual requirement per acre.

Never mind that cow's digestive systems aren't really designed for corn.

There's something like 1.5 billion cows in the world... 20ish gallons of water a day, 25 pounds of dry feed a day...

Meat is a luxury man. A luxury.

Don't you think it's safe to assume that technologies might not save us and that we should work on some alternatives, just in case the first scenario doesn't work?

> collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.

So you're saying that the _only_ way of preventing collapse is by technological advance? And that we should not try to make sociaty sustainable without growth, or at least to do some reasearch on how that might be possible?