201–210 of 332 posts
I don't entirely agree that degrowth belong to the elite. I'm quite poor in a developed country and I'm for degrowth. So maybe I'm still part of the elite.
Anyway degrowth is going to create a lot of necessary poverty, which could be solved by the usual democracy to reduce that pesky inequality.
It's true that we never really reduced inequality, we just threw a lot of GDP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but the parent post did not mention use of force. We cannot deny that there is a brain drain in many third world countries that desperately need well trained workers that is accelerated by acceptance of immigrants into developed nations like the US. Who’s going to lead these countries into better governance and economic improvement if all the talent is incentivized to leave their home countries for greener past…
Immigration was compared to "colonial appropriation" which doesn't exactly sound voluntary. In contrast, it would be a terrible thing to forcibly lock people into their birth countries to stop brain drain.
For example, many third-world countries had tax-free regimes for tech/services export in order to boost these industries. This made sense to them. If you made $100K contracting for a US company, you'd pay $0. But you'd also get to spend/transfer that much needed money into the economy. You'd probably also not use any of the government services because they are sub-par to what you can get privately.
Now, if you are required to pay an income tax at par to what you pay in developed countries, the whole scheme will no longer make sense. No one will agree to pay $50k and get no services in return. So you end moving to some other destination (ie: Dubai, or a western country where you pay $50k but relatively get your money's worth).
This is as close to war as it can get.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not voluntary to the drained countries
Sure it is, unless they have passed laws against emigration, like North Korea. (Of course, those laws would rightly be seen as totalitarian.)
The problem with ideas like this is that it takes the ladder away from middle class and the poor. Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth. Without it the power of the wealthy over them would become a weight pressing down with such force that it would intolerable.
"r > g" societies are ones where the wealth is concentrating. This can be masked if g is positive and everyone else is also getting better off in absolute terms.
"r > (g=0)" is therefore one where the rich are getting richer in a zero sum way; because there isn't any growth, you can only make a fortune by taking it off other people.
"0 >= g > r" on the other hand looks extremely different from today: the return on capital is zero or negative. How can you invest in that environment? Negative interest rates? Negative retirement savings?
(My somewhat bleak conclusion is therefore "r > g > 0 will remain, but with increasing catastrophes that wipe out chunks of both r and g")
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
25k saved (the difference in price between the cars) is more than most people have in savings. It would at least delay the fall of the guillotine long enough to find another job.
The trade-off between non-existent luxury is most visible in Europe. We get small flats, mostly. The choice is between way too small inconvenient flat, inconvenient location that forces hours of commute or being already rich.
The flats these days are much less luxurious than older post-war ones, and way smaller. Then again families were even twice as big and multigenerational, but flats were even 5 times bigger. The better furnishings these days slightly help but not enough.
Then again, there tends to be public transport that works, except in USA. So maybe you could get away with a bicycle commute if your health allows it. Not quite yet in most cities though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure there's an advanced "free market" bealthcare system in the world we can use to even make that comparison.
The free market produces goods and services at less cost for everything else, why would health care be any different?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why you should ensure that the medium of exchange does not get stuck with people who don't need it. They block the economy for everyone else, preventing us from helping ourselves.
It is not stuck. The billionaires are not hoarding all the dollars. They have stock in their companies, which is worth varying amounts of dollars. Them owning stock does not deprive you of any dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same sense any rights are “entirely up for discussion”. Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?
No, in a different sense, because the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right. The rights you have were decided upon by people who aren't you, and imposed on you. I'm theoretically sympathetic to your wanting to opt out of public services, but it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire.
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.
Why should we want to become the "dominant species in the universe" and not be statisfied with a good life within our means?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we want to become the "dominant species in the universe" and not be statisfied with a good life within our means?
Why would you settle for less as species if you could get it?