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The Case for Degrowth

lrb.co.uk

141–150 of 332 posts

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#141
post #68

Here's a few cases against degrowth: - https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-... - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/econom... The TL;DR is "the idea that economic growth requires growth in resource use is false; rich countries have started to grow while using less and less of the planet’s most important resources."

For the bloomberg piece: https://archive.ph/2tFbt

It's worth noting that the two articles are written by the same person, Noah Smith.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#142
post #102

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…

The American government dropped a science fiction bomb on two Japanese cities, invaded, and then dictated the rules of the Japanese state. They continue to have military bases on Japanese soil. Arrogant paternalism?

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me. You will have to explain how reducing growth dependence reduces agency. If anything, one could argue that there is no such thing as agency with growth dependence.

> You will have to explain how reducing growth dependence reduces agency. Your process of “reducing growth dependence” is fundamentally you stifling and regimenting growth. You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

> You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

No, neither is a fundamental right. Because both growth and degrowth as a national policy (or global international policy) has immense consequences on the opportunities and outcomes in peoples lives. Both stifle and regiment the lives and actions of people in a myriad of ways (climate change is a massive externality for everyone!), so anti-stifling arguments have no traction. The only arguments that can do real work will have to concern policy consequences: which policy yields better life outcomes in terms of health, wellbeing, longevity and so on.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#144
post #54

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…

Japan’s GDP per capita is similar to what it was in the mid-90s despite sizable per-worker productivity gains because their population is aging rapidly. However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.

What you're describing is a ponzi scheme.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#145
post #8
post #5

We are in the biggest global/sovereign debt crisis of the last 100 year, maybe more. The things that will cause an explosive collapse in this scenario is shrinking population and a global shrinking economy. Debt needs growth. It's like a mortgage on a house. It's a good deal if the house is increasing in value. It can quickly turn bad if the house is losing value. Personally, I'd prefer to see that collapse happen bu…

An economy that is dependent on continuously increasing population is the mother of all pyramid schemes.

When you read the comments in this article, everyone is basically arguing that abandoning the pyramid scheme and eliminating growth dependence is somehow going to make us poorer despite the fact that the vast majority of people in this thread only need growth to keep their jobs, not because they are unhappy with their massive salaries.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me. You will have to explain how reducing growth dependence reduces agency. If anything, one could argue that there is no such thing as agency with growth dependence.

> You will have to explain how reducing growth dependence reduces agency. Your process of “reducing growth dependence” is fundamentally you stifling and regimenting growth. You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

I don't know what kind of absurd logic you are following but you seem to hate the ability to choose between having degrowth, zero growth and some growth on the individual level. Your preconceived notions of growth force it upon every single individual one, in the current economic system there is no choice, you are going to follow the authoritarian "growthers" or you are going to be a laughing stock. You are actively arguing for reducing the agency of everyone, the ability for everyone to decide for themselves what they want.

>Your process of “reducing growth dependence” is fundamentally you stifling and regimenting growth.

Growth dependence is an economic force that forces people to growth their economic activity or see a depression or recession and lose their job, the threat of grow dependence makes people unable to make rational decisions, instead of thinking about their own needs people produce useless widgets and manipulate others into buying them because of a fear of losing the rigged competition. What people value isn't their productive output anymore, what they consider to be the source of their prosperity is that they are employed at all and the moment growth stops, employers are going to pile up less work onto fewer people, leaving some of them unemployed. We grow the economy to its maximum output because of full employment, so that everyone can work their 40 hours, this means we have to come up with increasingly pointless economic activity just to maintain this growth farce. In the long run this wastage of resources will shrink overall growth because long term resources are being allocated to short term needs that don't even exist and are just there to keep the economy going for one more year. If economic activity was mostly about food production, housing and other basic human needs, there wouldn't be much growth necessary to have a high standard of living, simply building longer lasting structures reduces the need for growth. Meanwhile growth dependence demands that we build houses that last 40 years and then tear them down, so that we can build them again. The idea that this is good for economic growth in the long run is laughable. The essence of growth dependence boils down to this after all: growing next quarter is really important, growing more overall over the next ten years is less important. So growth dependence isn't even an outcome, it is a dependence to make the same stupid decision over and over again. Think about it this way, over the next 10 years your economy is growing 8 times at 2% and two years at -3%. A growth dependent system will have to fake growth through inflation even in a short term degrowth environment for a single year. Inefficiencies will result in less overall growth. Meanwhile in an economy without growth dependence it doesn't matter if the economy grows or not because people get to decide how much growth they want. They don't have to fear unemployment or some other disadvantage.

>You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

Maybe it is too difficult for you to grasp these very simple terms.

My position: Abolishing growth dependence means every single economic actor gets to decide whether they want less growth(even negative growth), no growth or more growth.

Your position: Giving everyone the choice to not pick growth is bad. You must pick growth because I said so.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#147
post #111
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The comment was phrased as trenchant criticism of the Japanese on a matter that is strictly their own business, calling them racist & xenophobic and contrasting them to the USA who 'do immigration well'. Do this, be more like (supposedly virtuous) X and don't be Y & Z is clear paternalism and, in my opinion, highly arrogant paternalism to boot.

Boo boo? I'm not sure exactly why you expect Japan to be held to a different or lower standard than the rest of the world but I don't stop to think about the feelings of disgruntled nationals when bringing up racism in any other country.

What's far more arrogant is you thinking your culture is so magically different that you're somehow immune to such criticisms. I wonder how the Koreans and Chinese would feel about that.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#148

Ah yes, compound interest, the magic that makes everything grow exponentially. I do not believe the human mind can grasp exponential growth. If compound interest is absolute then 3% interest over 2000 years is equivalent to colonizing every single planet, even the barren ones, in more than 50 trillion milkyways. Even at the speed of light it will take 4 years to get to alpha centauri, you're not getting to the edge o…

Not everything grows evenly at the same rate. You can have 20% growth in one area but 0% expansion in to the universe, like you suggest.

It's like people saying buying property now is a great idea because we have 10%+ annualized inflation. Just because the CPI is >10%, it doesn't follow that houses prices will grow in an increasing interest rate environment.

System complexity. Feedback loops. Human Behavior etc.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#149

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.

> So why now?

From my reading of degrowth works the answer is: because now the global resource use induced by growth have accumulated enourmous negative externality costs, costs that will nedlessly increase further unless counteracted by degrowth policy. Food shortages, deadly heatwaves, property destruction. Direct dire costs to human health and welfare and rippling secondary effects. For example how would a scenario with hundreds of millions of climate refugees play out on top of current global political tensions?

I see the degrowth view not as "we should never ever have growth again" but rather the current modes of growth have very tangible imminent (on an astronomical timescale) negative effects that we must deal with right now. If we fail to step up to the current challenge of provisioning health and welfare for beings on this planet how likely are we to manage an all universe encompassing expansion without it ending in catastrophe on the largest scale? You could see the climate change challenge, and the degrowth plan to tackle it, as a necessary step to get our house in order, before expanding out.

Us attempting to expand into and shaping the universe is quite a task - so much could go right or wrong. I think Toby Ord's The Precipice[0] has a very useful framework for thinking about such risks.

[0] https://theprecipice.com/

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#150
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan’s GDP per capita is similar to what it was in the mid-90s despite sizable per-worker productivity gains because their population is aging rapidly. However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.

What you're describing is a ponzi scheme.

We see a similar effect in Europe, people live longer, and a large group is on pension, while retaining voting rights. This incentivize conservation of the status quo as we now have majority ownership of the societal future in the hands of a “rent-seeking owner class” that is not there to experience it. Controversial as it may be, I’m thinking that voting should somehow be coupled to taxable contribution to the society. Pensioners, children and other unemployed must be protected by laws instead of direct political influence.
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