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The Case for Degrowth

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Re: The Case for Degrowth

#31

Post by api »

xnx wrote: post #7
impossiblefork wrote: post #6

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.

Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much?

The rich don’t take much. The vast majority of their wealth is paper. A billionaire who jet sets around and has five homes and a staff might at most consume the resources of a few hundred middle class Americans.

You might approach the footprint of a medium sized town if you built your own orbital lair and lived like a cyberpunk oligarch in space. Maybe.

Of course for some resources there is little difference at all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t eat much more than you do.

Money is not physical. Start redistributing physical stuff and you’ll find that soaking the rich barely makes a dent.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#32

Post by dredmorbius »

asabjorn wrote: post #24
mjfl wrote: post #20

This is all very abstract, so you can't really see the stupidity behind it. You can say "economic growth is out of control, we need to reduce GDP by 50% and get comfortable with it" and many people will applaud. But if you say things like "We are growing too much food, we need to reduce the amount of food grown worldwide by 50%", people will realize the much more morbid consequences of your ignorant prescription - ma…

There also doesn't seem to be wide awareness that the degrowth people are currently intentionally sabotaging farming output. Sri Lankas food crisis is due to a forced stop in artificial fertilizer use and growth of only organic crops, and there are likewise farmer protests in the Netherlands (5th largest food producer), Belgium, Germany etc due to the governments pushing this. Closer to home the "inflation reduction…

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 in nitrogen fertiliser) results in lower applications of fertiliser as well as of reduced cultivation, and consequent reduced crop yields.

Again, that's a simple market mechanisms and response to costs, not an ideologically-driven policy of degrowth, deindustrialised ag, or natural / sustainable / organic ag.

Though it is a portent of what might face us would such choices be forced upon the world more generally. This is the notion of a technology trap (also "innovation trap" or "progress trap"). See James Burke's Connections, particularly episode 1, Ronald Wright's Massey Lecture series and books, Joseph Tainter, and many others.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#33

Post by bsedlm »

mulmen wrote: post #11
impossiblefork wrote: post #6

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.

This seems to conflate the ideas of growth and value. Labor creates some growth but is mostly value. Value is the reallocation of existing wealth. Growth is the creation of new wealth. Both happen when we do (productive) work. Capital needs to get comfortable with the idea that they must "spend money to make money".

I'm not sure I follow...

value is the realocation of wealth?

hmm, surely to realocate wealth has some value, but what's the relation between wealth and value?

also, what about rent? what does rent do to wealth? to growth? to value?

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#34

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #25

It's worth considering for the historical perspective as well. "Economic growth" is a mantra which emerged really only since the 1950s, and in the shadows respectively of the Great Depression, the collapse of Weimar Germany, the rise of Soviet Russia and Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist Communism, and of course World War II. It was not at all clear that a constantly growing capitalist market economy was possible. (The arti…

[deleted]

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#35

Post by phailhaus »

Yoric wrote: post #26
mjfl wrote: post #20

This is all very abstract, so you can't really see the stupidity behind it. You can say "economic growth is out of control, we need to reduce GDP by 50% and get comfortable with it" and many people will applaud. But if you say things like "We are growing too much food, we need to reduce the amount of food grown worldwide by 50%", people will realize the much more morbid consequences of your ignorant prescription - ma…

Well, we do need food. But do we need it so highly processed? Do we really need video game consoles or Netflix? Do we need to change phone or car quite so often? I'm sure we all can find a number of things that we own and shouldn't really have bought. I'm not sure what it takes to degrow, but I'm pretty convinced that there's lots of fat in our consumerist lives that could be trimmed away even without changing our da…

> But do we need it so highly processed?

Yes. This is how you bring down the cost of food to get it to enough people.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#36

Post by dredmorbius »

anm89 wrote: 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…

Debt is a social construct and ultimately a notional and notational reality, not a real one.

Real wealth is not financial but physical --- "the annual produce and labour of the nation" in Adam Smith's formulation (and hence a flow rather than a stock as many commentators have noted). Debt and credit reflect claims on that wealth, but not the wealth itself.

Disrupting the claim-making system does have profund effects upon distribution, but does not fundamentally affect the actual production function itself. That is, by reallocating debt, one may influence who has claims on wealth produced, but even an infinite expansion of those claims still runs into upper limits of production, that being the classic definition of runaway-printing-press monetary inflation.

There are several post-WWII articles on prisoner-of-war camp economics, often based on tokenised (though not barter) transactions based on cigarettes and other standardised items, interacting with both relief packages (generally provided by the International Red Cross) and some amount of indigenous POW-camp services (barbering, laundry, and entertainment, for example). The characteristics, benefits, and limitations of strict monetary manipulation were made clear.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#38

Post by kspacewalk2 »

sega_sai wrote: post #23

It's certainly a thought provoking piece. I'm wondering how stable the system is if all countries decide to degrowth, but one doesn't play ball. Naively you'd think that country would start to dominate economically/politically, so others may have to 'defect' as well... But maybe that's too simplistic.

The exact same logic makes nuclear disarmament extremely, almost laughably unlikely.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#39

Post by pessimizer »

zmgsabst wrote: post #22
pessimizer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious. Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn. What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security . They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized hea…

> I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry. I wouldn’t — and there’s been times I was quite hungry while homeless. Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.

> your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.

That's entirely up for discussion. Civilization has imposed a lot of choices on you that you may not like.

Re: The Case for Degrowth

#40

Post by mattnewton »

dredmorbius wrote: post #19
impossiblefork wrote: post #6

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.

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…

It’s certainly the best ladder I’m aware of that we’ve discovered- you climb it, by and large, by providing value to other people. A little value to a lot of people, usually. And because you are producing new value, you don’t provoke a conflict by reallocating the value away from the previous people.

Most older ladders were providing a lot of value to a few existing rulers, and concentrated the utility-allocating aspects of society in the hands of a few. And much of the value being provided was through violent seizure.

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