Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Case for Degrowth

lrb.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 332 posts

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#101

Post by kmeisthax »

imtringued wrote: post #67
dredmorbius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This observation begs the questions: Is this the only such ladder? And why is it that economic growth seems to be the only ladder recognised in the economic mainstream for poverty alleviation? The latter question is one that's addressed often in the writing and talks of Herman Daly, one example I've recently come across being a 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the CASSE podcast, which discusses Daly's work and academic h…

Imagine there is a leech stuck on your body sucking blood. You will now have to eat more to replenish the blood. Here is the kicker though, the leech gets bigger as it sucks out more blood out of your body and therefore it will start draining more blood from your body. You go to your doctor and he says take these pills they will make your body grow bigger. As the leech gets bigger you must get bigger which means you…

The problem with the leech analogy is that we can't actually tell what part of society is "the leech".

Society and economics can be best described not as a human with a leech on it, but a writhing mass of leeches all sucking each others' blood. In other words, mutual parasitism. What parts of the economy can be "gotten rid of" - as in, the people who run them being socially marginalized or worse - depends solely on what you value; rather than any objective criteria.

The historical examples of zero-growth societies are rather bleak. They were closed, feudalistic societies that relied upon strict classes with disenfranchised peasants or slaves at the bottom. This is the most optimal strategy for exploiting a static resource economy[0]. Liberal democracies are tied to economies with some level of growth to them, because there needs to be new treasure to chase in order to allow a continued changing of the guard and the deposition of elites.

[0] Related note: most historical examples of witch trials in Europe were ways to punish people with newly-acquired wealth. Zero-growth was the oxygen people breathed back then; and anyone with new wealth was looked at with suspicion. Did they steal it? Did they sign a deal with the devil?

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#102

Post by oska »

roflyear wrote: post #65
thematrixturtle wrote: post #51

Japan is a living case study of degrowth: GDP has been essentially flat for the past 20 years. The scale below exaggerates small shifts, but it was $4968B in 2000 and $4937B in 2020. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-fo…

There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.

> No one talks about it

People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else. Telling the Japanese what they should do is arrogant paternalism.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#103

Post by pembrook »

Degrowth is basically Communism, but in reverse.

The idea that you can centrally plan a strategic "shrinking" of an economy, and it will somehow end up better than the times humans have tried to centrally plan the "growth" of an economy (Eg. USSR, Cuba, North Korea, etc) is very amusing to me.

Humans are animals, and when you create scarcity, you increase the rewards to exploitation and violence. We will quickly begin killing each other and engaging in power games to get what we want under any scenario of centrally-planned artificial scarcity.

Humans are already de-growthing themselves naturally (the free market approach). Let's not screw this up by trying to engage in authoritarian central planning fantasies.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#104

Post by honkkong420 »

juve1996 wrote: post #66
nickff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to be willing to trade some level of security for some level of luxury. This is why people take out the largest mortgage they possibly can given their income, and spend money they don't have on cars (which they will take a long time to pay off). These revealed preferences are hard to deny, and it would be quite presumptuous to impose a different trade-off on a plurality/majority of the populace.

What choice do people have? It doesn't make sense to trade anything for security because that security is non-existent anyway. Losing your job & health benefits for much of the middle class would be a death sentence regardless if they bought a 35k car or a 10k beater.

Strongly disagree, being able to accumulate enough money to cover the bumps of life can be the difference between stringing along a middle class existence and everything working out and going broke.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#105

Post by nico »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #58
nico wrote: post #14

On a slightly related note. I wonder what impact of volume pricing (ie. wholesale: cheap/unit, retail: expensive/unit) has in our society. What would happen if this was flipped and pricing per unit was directly correlated with volume (ie. more volume, more expensive per unit)? Could it work?

"society" doesn't decide if we should have volume pricing. The seller wants to sell more to the buyer, so they offer a discount. "society" could, on the other hand, decide to impose taxes on individuals that consume more than their fair share.

I’m not thinking about why it happens or who is “the culprit”.

Just wondering about the impact of such structure and what would happen if businesses/people decided to use something different.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#106

Post by RandomLensman »

So why now? Would it have been better to stop growing in Roman or medial times, for example? Or stop only in a 100 years?

Degrowth seems to me like a vision of the future that assumes that humans should remain slaves of their environment and not become masters of it. If humans are to become the dominant species in the universe, degrowth will not help.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#107

Post by legolas2412 »

neilwilson wrote: post #81
roflyear wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.

Immigration is just colonial appropriation. It's the solution proposed by city dwellers who think we should live 50 deep in a square mile of massive cities - generally an upper middle class who seem to believe they should have constant access to cheap servants they don't have to personally house and look after. Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work. We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go…

> including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.

Oh, I didn't realize I was a slave to a country. And the act of immigration which I willfully do, and the host country is pretty much hostile about, is "stealing" me. If Western countries wanted to steal me, they should not have put up such roadblocks to immigration

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#108

Post by refurb »

People love to rail against growth because they use it as some proxy for "consumerism" or "materialism".

If you actually take a step back and realize that economic growth is what pays for infrastructure, social programs, public pensions, healthcare, the idea "we should just get comfortable with less" seems much less appealing.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#109

Post by dredmorbius »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #56
dredmorbius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sri Lanka's various crises are not a result of degrowth policies, but because the country simply has no money to pay for imports . Including of fertilisers. The arrow of causality is fiscal collapse -> agricultural collapse. It's possible to look at historical crop yields worldwide, including in advanced / wealthy nations, and see where economic recession or high energy (especially natural gas, the primary feedstock…

Sri Lanka banned the use and importation of chemical fertilizers before though.

A year ago, not in some distant past.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

As the economic crisis was already in process --- it's been developing since 2019:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%93present_Sri_Lanka...

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#110

Post by imgabe »

oska wrote: post #102
roflyear wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.

> No one talks about it People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else . Telling the Japanese what they s…

I don't think anyone is under the impression that the country of Japan is obligated to do what some random Internet commenter thinks.

People are allowed to have opinions that something would be a good course of action or not. That's not paternalism.

Post reply on HN