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Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much?
> Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much? No, but it's antithetical to everything we think and believe for Capital to not take its profits before everyone else.
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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.…
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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 asp…
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Sometimes people just have to see the result of a policy to get it.
Indeed. The problem is that all of us who already know "degrowth" is bad are going to have to suffer through the result along with them.
Among my thoughts as I read this, one which has recurred from time to time: it might be interesting to attempt some kind of reading club on HN in which an article or book is selected for future discussion. This piece runs about 10 pages printed, or roughly 5,000 words, which seems to challenge HN. And that's before considering that it's further discussing not one but four books, totalling over 1,000 pages. I'd be qui…
There are groups for Metafilter and Econtalk and things.
Why not set up one there and advertise it on HN and select a book and see how it goes?
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.
What happens when due to immigration or rising standards the immigration tap runs dry?
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.
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…
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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…
Video games and Netflix are among the least environmentally impactful forms of entertainment. They use far less land and resources than, say, golf or most sports.
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…
Yes it was a terrible policy to issue an immediate ban on fertilizers, and don't think organizations/ngos associated with the policy should be absolved, but there also has to be a look into where we are in terms of 'planetary boundaries' (Google it) and what it means.
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> 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.
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”?
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.