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 but understand it would be incredibly nasty. I think most people drastically underestimate how fucked up the world would be if GDP and population fell by 1% annually for the next 10 years.
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.
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.
As opposed to what? A carbon based life form? A monster truck?
Yes literally every thing that humans interact with that isn't constructed of atoms is a social construct. Contracts, agreements, trades, transactions. Every single concept in finance and economics. This isn't a profound statement
Contrast with, say, physical or natural phenomena: the size of the Earth, solar insolation, the prevalence of various chemical elements within the Earth's crust, their organisation (or lack) into ores, their cycling through the biosphere, net primary productivity, and the like.
A debt, by contrast, is a socially-recognised and generally legally sanctioned claim on another's wealth or productivity. That is, debt is fundamentally informational, and records a relationship, but that relationship is not fundamentally grounded in any underlying physical reality. As is noted, "debts that cannot be repaid won't", and when the notional fiction runs up against such a reality, the debt is retired. That is, the information is changed.
There are numerous cultural, legal, and financial reasons to believe and behave otherwise, but ultimately, debts are a social, not a natural or intrinsic construct. Their behaviour is ultimately more a symptom than a cause of a larger growth or collapse.
Debt wants growth, but need not have it. The principle challenge is that the modern monetary system based on central banks and fiat currencies was developed in a world of rapid economic growth. It need not be limited to such a world. Currency sovereigns can both retire debts and introduce new liquidity to maintain a flow which supports commercial transactions. A major problem to date has been that new liquidity introductions tend to be to the wealth-holding classes rather than those requiring currency to pay for current and essential demand and consumption. Again, there are historical reasons for this, but they are still cultural and notional, not some underlying Law of the Universe.
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.
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.
Real estate is not the medium of exchange. And the answer there is to build more real estate and have high taxes on any property that isn't a primary residence.
There's "rich people" buying houses, which are investment funds that buy property to rent - that is still availalbe on the market and isn't decreasing the supply of housing.
Rich people buying homes for personal use can't have an appreciable effect on pricing. You couldn't afford a billionaire's eighth home in whatever city even if it were available for sale anyway.
Which can be easily resolved by taking building regulations from NIMBYs and giving them to YIMBYs and letting people build build more or less anything anywhere. 1000 billionaires having 5000 houses have no effect in comparison with hundreds of thousands of houses not built because of regulations.
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".
Yes, the reallocated wealth is itself previously captured growth. Value is created from wealth when it is reallocated but while it is held no value is created.
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 health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
edit: I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry.
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.
> the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right
You just said the right to not be a slave is a made-up right.
> it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire
So don’t? — but you’re losing me at the point you go from “I save money by not tracking exceptions” to “I have the right to make you participate because I want your money”.
> because the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right
I agree with this statement. Actually, I consider this more of a principle than a right. Society should aim to minimize the degree to which it imposes the will of the government on the citizens, not fundamentally because freedom is an a priori right, but because it leads to a more peaceful society.
A society where the citizens do not tolerate would be tyrants that want to excessively dictate how people live, tends to be (EDIT) more stable, innovative or economically competitive over time.
Citizens of a freedom-loving society may not all understand this from first principles. Even if most believe they have such a right somewhat dogmatically, it may still have the same outcome.
Dogmatism may come with the downside of seeing people with different opinions as evil, though, and may sometimes lead to needless conflict.
> Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?
That discussion has been settled in the West, at least for now. In many places, the discussion is still ongoing, and in fact, they are an estimated 40 million slaves (or similarly bonded people) on Earth today, or about 10x as many as in the US South in 1860.
I find it a bit funny that in an increasingly atheistic society, some Christian values are held even more axiomatically than ever before, and racism is particular
Statues of American founders get torn down due to some link to it. Imagine if everything around the world with some link to forced labor would be given the same treatment. We would have to remove almost every ancient monument or statue from Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, India, China, former Aztec and Inka peoples, just to mention a few.
Also most ancient works of writing, from all over the globe would have to be given introduction with warning that the author may have owned slaves or benefitted from slave labor.
I'm not American. I did not grow up with the legacy of American slavery. By no means do I endorse slavery, but when reading about Aristotle's ideas about slavery, I'm able to imagine a world where slavery is seen as normal. In many cases, those who lost some war would end up as slaves. But typically, that would go both ways. Whichever side won would enslave the other.
I have trouble seeing almost every inhabitant of classical Europe, the Middle East or North Africa as evil just because they either did own slaves, or would have owned slaves had they been able to.
Just like I have trouble seeing a Lion or Hyena as evil for eating a Zebra. (Ok, maybe I can see the Hyena as evil, mainly because they're ugly ;)
>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 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.
Growth or degrowth are not national policies but individual ones. You cannot prevent someone with growth mindset from doing actions leading to growth. And at the same time, nobody is preventing people with degrowth mindset to practice what they preach.
> Growth or degrowth are not national policies but individual ones
Degrowth as used in the OP article is about macro level policy. For example solar panel subsidies, taxing coal and investments in public transportation.
Individual actions performed in the name of "growth mindset" (whatever that means) can like any other actions be stopped, and likely will be stopped if they cause harm to others.
Can you name any country successful in stopping people with a mindset that they want to grow, mainly financially, or into power?
In capitalism, these are entrepreneurs.
In democracy, these are politicians.
In autocracy, these are dictators, army generals.
In theocracy, these are pharaos, etc.
In nature, these are alpha wolves.
Even people proposing degrowth, if they're going to achieve their goal, will have to be power hungry, alpha wolves (no matter how they will market themselves), not that different from people I describe. And they will have to fight constantly. There is no way how to stop need for getting better, getting more, competing, winning...
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.
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.
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.
Unless you can't work, have to retrain, your work is dependent on not driving a beater, driving one of these is not banned due to environmental concerns... then it would delay nothing.
Ultimately you will incur maintenance costs.
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.
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.
Security (or risk) is not a Boolean (even though it may seem so psychologically), but a probability (or set of probabilities for different outcomes).
"I could die tomorrow, so it doesn't matter what I do today." is not a healthy way of thinking.
Spending less, eating healthy, learning useful stuff, exercising more and building good social relations with your family, community and professional contacts are all factors that improve the likelihood of positive outcomes.
You could still die (or end up broke and sick) tomorrow. There could even be nuclear war, for all I know. Or you could rent a Ferrari, spend a week drinking, gambling and whoring in Las Vegas, and end up meeting a person at the poker table that will make you rich, but the probability is low. (Unless you're already rich or famous.)
If you live humbly and healthily from you're 20 to you're 50, you may already have saved up enough buffer that from then on, you work because you want to, not because you have to (even on a median salary). If you go on until you're 70, you probably have enough for one more generation to have a jump start on the same level of safety, if they follow your example.
Though in my experience, families who follow such values over multiple generations are already wealthy, and often quite rich. Living with dignity well within their means, and not flaunting wealth in public, are some of the main hallmarks of "old money".
Those preferences are greatly shaped by inequality and status consumption. Change the institutional backdrop (which degrowth policy aims to do) and the preferences change. Robert Frank's work is great on much luxury consumption is contagious despite wildly inefficient because it is a relative status game. This Q & A is an intro
https://behavioralscientist.org/putting-peer-pressure-to-wor...
> The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious.
That's not for you to decide. The market can and does apply proper growth slowing pressure by itself.
> Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn.
That's just a different version of "think of the poor who can't eat". Countries and cultures aren't the same. Suburbia only exists due to improper distribution of business centers and housing bubbles. Overpopulated mega-cities don't have to exist with proper distribution of work and living space. Majority of countries are uninhabited and undeveloped.
> What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security.
Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.
> 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.
Firing is necessary to keep efficiency and competition.
> Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
Who will "supply security"? People who work and who are getting paid so they buy stuff. Who pays and produce their stuff? Other people who need to work. The demand for "security" will only keep increasing due to comfort. There's a reason Bill Clinton was elected on a platform to reform the welfare system.
> We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
> Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.
This is always a dubious comparison to me. Why are you poor people worried about the continued lack of atonomy you experience due to a lack of ownership in modern society? The state will give you penecilin. The duke of dorkingshire might have looked like he was doing well but he did have gout to contend with.
Research suggest that nearly half is delivered by emergency departments. So even if it was half of that, your statement would still be an outright lie. What is your source that it is very little?
Because healthcare as a service does not come even close to satisfy the conditions required for perfect competition.
Without going too much in detail, the "customers" cannot have perfect information regarding the treatment or course of action that's most convenient for them at a given moment, and they cannot freely decide when (or often whether) to make use of the service or not—"It's probably best I get appendicitis now that I can afford it rather than wait until next year".
The free market does not require perfect competition nor perfect information at all. Imperfect information, for example, is called "risk", and risk is factored into every price.
Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?
> Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?
Where have I come even close to suggesting it would? Perfect information, to the extent it can be possible, is a requirement for a market to be efficient. What you call "socialist medicine" is by definition not a market, so perfect information is a moot point.
What universal healthcare can provide is the adequate incentives for providing early diagnosis, promoting preventative medicine, and giving safe and effective treatment. Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?
Furthermore, pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line, and who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered. This already happens to an extent under the current U.S. model. There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.
Do you actually have anything to say, or are you just going to avoid having to form coherent arguments by saying “what about communism” to anyone who replies to you.
Do you have a proof for such a statement? AFAIK most of negative externalities are either negligible or easy to be sued for. Or a responsibility of informed customer.
Of course, there's that ultimate hammer of greenhouse gases everybody is using daily, but besides these it is hard to confirm this. And these have also many positive externalities (access to plastics, cheap energy) that cannot be ignored, otherwise we would live in carbon-zero economy already.
It's not an either-or situation. In the UK we have a socialised health care system with a private health care system available to those that want it. I guess it's a question of how much you care about the plight of people at the bottom of society and how much you see it as a sort of civic duty to increase their access to high quality health care regardless of their life outcomes (low income).
I'm lucky that I don't rely on our national health service for everything but I still gladly pay towards it's running so others can use it. Of all the things the government taxes me for directly or indirectly payments towards the national health care service ranks very low on the list of annoyances.
I was alluding to the progress in medical tech, and the corresponding rise in the cost of specialised medical equipment. While we developed fancy tools like accurate MRI machines that let us treat patients better, they also cost more to buy. My intuition tells me that in the 1960s, treating people was cheaper because we just didn't have any machinery to spend more money on.
Health care expenses tracked inflation until the late 1960s, when it started dramatically outpacing inflation. The 1960s saw a massive influx of the government into health care. The pace of medical cost increases hasn't slowed down since. Every new government intervention makes it worse.
That does not seem to match up with current reality. At least not if the US is to be the example for free market health care. Looking at the stats it is by far the most expensive compared with pretty much any socialized health care in the world (and with worse outcomes): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
However, I believe that their lack of security is due to their lack of power, and that their lack of power is due to their lack of wealth, their loans and that they do not own the companies in which they work.
Consequently I see wealth and power as effectively the same and become moderately unhappy when I see policies that will in any way reduce the wealth or power of ordinary people.
So, while I used the word 'conditions' I actually meant their state of subjugation.
Usually the degrowth people also advocate for massive redistribution so that everyone would be equally poor. I doubt that's politically possible in most of the world so the alternative would be feudal degrowth which, as you said, is evil.
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 heritage:
A more useful framing of the question might be to assume that degrowth is a given, whether you believe this or not, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns.
The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth and absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms which notes that the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now), without reallocation.
But wealth and livelihood allocation are social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, several times.
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.
Eventually these ladders have a top. The 20th century is a mere aberration in growth in human timescales. It's easy to say this is the best - but we're simply biased - it was the best, for us, for a time, largely due to hegemony. The cracks are rapidly showing. Eventually knew value can't be created out of massive scientific advancements (low hanging fruit) we've had. New value will come from others (labor cost reductions to the far east, for example.)
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 must take more pills. If you stop taking the pills, the leech will outpace your body growth and your body will suffer from anemia despite having more blood in your body than the average healthy human.
Suddenly everyone gets a fetish for being as large as an possible, it is good for your health, nobody ever questions whether they should just get rid of the leech and get their body to a normal height.
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?
No, because there is no mathematical proof for any assertion in economics. You cannot prove economics true.
However, historical counter-examples of zero-growth democracies are limited. We might look to the Greeks or Romans as examples of democracy in the antiquities; but there's two problems with that:
1. Their democracies were limited, with no universal suffrage and very low citizenship rates.
2. They had economic growth anyway. Rome in particular was as addicted to military conquest then as America is to oil today.
Selectorate theory[0] would argue this point in the opposite direction; i.e. that strict dictatorships squander economic growth. Political and economic franchise are inherently linked: people who cannot vote will have their livelihoods taken away from them, while those who produce the economy's goods will eventually demand political power themselves. Democracies are ultimately the means by which we distribute political power among the people, and that is itself a reflection of the distribution of economic production. If you give the people political power, the economy can't help but to grow as they are no longer being shackled.
But I think there's an even simpler argument than that. If the economy is zero-growth, then the only way for an individual to improve their living conditions is to make someone else's worse. This turns the economy into a zero-sum game of who can monopolize everything the fastest, which spikes income inequality, which makes it easier to disenfranchise voters, and eventually results in the ossification of social and political structures (since you shut up everyone that you said didn't matter).
The distinction between parasites and symbiotes needs to be made here. Too many in society are parasites, despite portraying the impression they are symbiotes. I'd posit entire industries fall into that category.
Every living organism that doesn't have photosynthesis may be seen in some way as a parasite.
Every individual live in something like an ecosystem. I would argue that society is part of the ecosystem for humans.
Whether or not (or in what cases) one individual should be forced to give up resources to another will be a never-ending discussion. Should government money be used for development aid abroad? For social welfare domestically? Are you responsible for caring for your parents? Your sibling? Your children? Is a mother responsible for providing her biological resources to an unborn child?
We may never come to permanent, full agreement on most of these questions.
"in some way" sure, but in lots of other ways not. For the sake of discussion let's pose one way in which we could define the distinction as a purely utilitarian metric - does an individual contribute more to society than they take out. The problem is that it seems to me that many individuals are professionally parasitic. That is their jobs, which they carry out diligently and conscientiously, don't contribute anything useful. As such they are purely drains on society.
I would put much of the finance industry in that bracket, which is essentially a rent seeking industry (albeit in various convoluted ways). It's doubly bad in finance because it sucks huge amounts of talent from areas where the individuals could actually contribute usefully.
Isn't it odd that without the poor get poorer even though common sense tells you that a lack of growth shouldn't make you poorer?
Or think about it this way, when there is no growth left, you must actually get people to cooperate with each other and as far as I know we never learned how to do that.
Well of course it is getting more skewed. A lot of industries have not actually become more productive. Industries where making the first copy is very difficult, and subsequent copies are basically free, be it software, books, movies, TV. Economies of scale, opening to new markets means those returns are higher than ever.
Compare that to a janitor pushing a broom. How has he become more efficient in the last 50 years. And a lot of industries seem to have had negative productivity growth, the ratio of administrators to professors in college is going in the wrong direction
"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")
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 quite interested in hearing from those who've read one or all of these, and if there were some way to invoke MacBeth's weird sisters, and agree when we three (or however many) should meet again to discuss them ... would be of interest.
There actually was a proposal for an HN book club ... 14 years ago:
Take it up with Dang. Could be a monthly post like the hiring posts. Probably rig up a poll for voting on next month’s book. You could make your own posts, but they would never get traction without some HN leadership blessings.
HN used to have book recommendation posts pretty often, but maybe we’ve gotten less literary over time. I’ve read about a dozen books that were recommended here and they were all awesome.
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?
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 - mass starvation by millions of people. Of course then you start talking about managed, equitable degrowth in just developed countries, but then you realize that a lot of the economic activity in developed countries plugs into farming in developing countries (natural gas for ammonia for fertilizer) and you realize you can't escape. And then maybe you realize you should have just sat on your couch and shut up, which is what most people with these sorts of opinions should do.
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 act" spends $20 billion to put farmland out of farm use, and also implement incentives to force farmers to significantly reduce production.
This will cause food shortages like it already has in Sri Lanka. Expect huge spikes in food prices like we've seen for gas.
You’ve already lived through artificial gas shortages since February 2021 after fracking and gas pipelines were shut down, so that’s demonstrably incorrect. Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.
Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
The february 2021 had causes that are well researched. It's not indicative of anything.
> Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.
The US has barely built refineries over the last 3 decades. This is not a new phenomenon.
> Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
Can you point this out in the bill so I can read it?
Let me look for a good source for the inflation reduction bill.
In the meantime here you can see the catastrophic effect of Sri Lankan style ESG policies in the Netherlands, as projected by their finance ministry. Netherlands is the 5th largest food exporter in the world.
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.
After the fertilizer ban was implemented, then "Production of tea — Sri Lanka’s main cash crop — fell by 18% in a year. Production of rice — the main food crop — fell by even more" [1]
So you're saying this did not contribute to the food shortage (a drop in domestic production of rice)?
Or you're saying this drop in production would've happened irrespective of the fertilizer ban?
asabjorn's claim was that ag productivity was directly sabotaged.
That is a highly unlikely reading of a situation I see as:
1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.
2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.
3. Resulting ground truth was that ag productivity collapsed, as you note.
Again, the driver was not "let's de-grow the economy", but "we can't afford what we had". In the context of other comments I've made on this thread, what Sri Lanka are experiencing might better be interpreted as an unplanned collapse rather than a longer-term, planned, and engineered de-growth. Sri Lanka's fertiliser ban itself was a consequence, not a driver, of unplanned collapse.
The usual poster-child of the alternative viewpoint might be Cuba. That country also saw a dramatic reduction in foreign support when its patron state the Soviet Union itself collapsed. There was a dramatic and difficult period of adjustment, but the result has been a stable and sufficient existence, if not one at notional OECD / major industrialised nation levels of wealth and income.
> 2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.
In your reuters link seem to contradict your claim: "The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilisers in Sri Lanka". It was officially rolled back after protests, but "only a trickle of chemical fertilisers made it to farms" so it sounds like supply lines acted as if they were still in place.
> 1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.
That doesn't seem like a great excuse for banning fertilizer, or an explanation for why after rollback of ban only a "only a trickle" of fertilizer was available. The claims in my source and reuters seems to be that the supply was not there, not that fertilizer prices were high. Do you have any source saying fertilizer was available at much higher cost?
Regardless of competency in Sri Lankas governments execution they have been working with WEF on their sustainable farming goals for a while. This agenda seek to ban fertilizer, make us all eat bugs instead of meat and move to organic farming.
Getting a high ESG score due to meeting sustainability goals grants benefits when getting loans, Sri Lankas is 98, so I share your intuition that a huge contributing factor is that they really need those loans due to long term mismanagement.
As I've pointed out elsewhere other WEF sustainable farming aligned governments such as the Dutch have implemented very similar policies and as abruptly, triggering the same kind of large scale protests and dire outcomes:
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/07/ministry-figures-sugge...
I am at this point taking WEF seriously, as real-world negative outcomes does not seem to stop implementation of their catastrophic tyrannical policies.
According to one estimate, the president’s agrochemical ban was poised to save Sri Lanka the $400 million it was spending yearly on synthetic fertilizer, money it could use toward increasing imports of other goods. But Rajapaksa also argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were leading to “adverse health and environmental impacts” and that such industrial farming methods went against the country’s heritage of “sustainable food systems.”
And:
“Sri Lanka started subsidizing fertilizers in the 1960s and we saw that rice yields tripled,” says Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a US-based environmental nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions.
One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses.
The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold.
While there are just 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 15 million of the country’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.
This article should give you the context and data points showing you do not have all the information
That narrative (affiliating the collapse of Sri Lanka with ESG, Degrowth) has been getting pushed primarily by people on the other side of the planet with their own political biases (libertarians, preppers, bitcoin maximalists, etc.).
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.
I agree that there are other issues such as huge loans from China ( belt&road is a economic catastrophe where deployed), tourism drop due to covid and a 2019 bombing etc
That said the ESG actions is clearly correlated in the data with 1/3 of farmland laying dormant in 2021, crop losses and yield issues. Many of us won’t forget Sri Lanka was touted by WEF as a ESG poster child before it went south.
Fair point, I'm not trying to defend ESG (there's all sorts of issues with it), but authors from abroad (like Michael Shellenberger who you link to) are seemingly caricaturizing the Sri Lanka situation (a mix of economic loan entanglement and bad policy) to argue for their narrative.
Shellenberger who you link to is "A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them.[2][3] Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, calling them "bad science" and "inaccurate"." (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger )
There are data points in reality supporting the outcome of ESG policies such as 1) 1/3 of Sri Lankan farmland lay dormant after fertilizer ban & forced organic farming 2) 85% of farmers have crop issues 3) yield issues causing food shortages.
Since he describes a catastrophic reality caused directly by very real government policies, this can't just be discounted as a fabricated narrative.
De-growth people will cause mass worldwide starvation in the next 6 months, and the policies are implemented in tyrannical ways so these are tyrants and will soon be murderous tyrants.
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 daily lives meaningfully.
Arguing for greater efficiency or arguing against luxury is so, so different from arguing for degrowth. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems that degrowth is fundamentally misanthropic. And the core of the misanthropic philosophy is the belief that mankind and nature are two different things.
Mankind is to Nature as a cancer cell is to the rest of the organism. Very much part of it,
also very much going to kill it because it can't stop growing and consuming resources. But there is no intent, it's just buggy code.
> Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems that degrowth is fundamentally misanthropic. And the core of the misanthropic philosophy is the belief that mankind and nature are two different things.
I don't believe that one follows from the other. Humanity is part of nature. Humans are sentient, and groups of humans can decide that society and/or group systems should ideally behave in one way or another, e.g. that an economy can be organized in one way or another. Humans can also make models about the future, and make statistical predictions based upon current (sophisticated) understanding of how systems work. This sets humans apart from other organisms in nature which also operate un(or less)consciously in groups, such as ants, viruses, etc, and which have growth that is unchecked to the extent that resources permit.
Therefore, it doesn't follow that humans being part of nature implies that unchecked growth is inevitable; humanity recognizing that there are in fact finite resources on this planet which we're currently bound to, and attempting to tailor the systems which affect rate of growth to ensure sufficient runway with those resources, is a very pro-humanity thing to do. That is, some control of population and resource-usage with the goal of preventing resource and environmental exhaustion and subsequent mass calamity is a tradeoff that attempts to promote the longevity of reasonable living standards with the possible expense of some liberties and the possible reining in of some unthinking consumption patterns. That doesn't equate to misanthropy, any more than preventing a 3 year old from eating a fourth bowl of ice cream does.
I'm not convinced that it quite extends to the entire spectrum of junk food, though. Processing oreos (feel free to replace with anything else) quite so much may bring the cost down, but I doubt that it actually does anything to feed people.
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.
Framing degrowth as a choice (against continued economic growth / business as usual (BAU)), rather than as a planned de-escallation as an alternative to an unplanned catastrophic collapse and/or descent into some post-prosperity feudalistic gilded era in which a vanishingly small fraction of global haves might enjoy something approximating present high-consumption lifestyles but the overwhelming majority do not and never will ... is ignoring the fundamental reality of the degrowth / steady state argument which is that planetary boundaries exist. There are limits to resource availability, as we've known for a long time, as well as to sink capacities --- the ability of the environment to absorb the effluvia of our activities without undergoing a catastrophic shift.
There are also quite probably systemic responses, including (though I'd suggest not limited to) the emergence of global epidemics and pandemics of disease and dysfunction. Kyle Harper's recent book, The Fate of Rome, advances the case that diseases co-evolve with civilisation. This itself becomes an interesting counterpoint to the well-worn argument that science, technology, and progress have relieved humans of the evils of infectious disease. It was progress, population growth, commerce, and urbanisation which created those plagues in the first place. As Jarred Diamond noted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was the Old World with its crowded cities and vast commercial networks which introduced plagues to the New (with a very few possible exceptions, and those largely very slow-moving insults).
Though of course, diseases of the tropics were well-known. Those however are overwhelmingly zoonotic and parasite-based rather than trasmitting directly between humans, and reflect the same dynamics (huge populations and intense intercourse) though of other species, typically insects. Diseases of sanitation and hygiene, notably cholera, would be the other principle exception, though that was introduced to Europe largely from the Indian subcontinent.
Again, the point isn't that degrowth is an option to BAU, it's an option to a far worse collapse or oppressive wealth concentration with massive disenfranchisement. The fact that discussing the issue in these terms an on this basis is so readily derailed is itself among the profound challenges in achieving a non-worst-case outcome. I've pointed before to the work of William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, Plato's Revenge) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (various) before, I'll recommend them without reservation here again.
Degrowth is a euphemism for recession. That's literally what it is: receding economic activity. Degrowth proponents are among the most counterproductive advocates of climate policy, and are a huge source of ammunition for a opponents that try to claim that climate action is just anti-capitalism in disguise. Increases energy usage is not necessarily necessary for increased economic growth. Higher efficiency and less energy intensive lines of business provide growth with the same or even less energy use. Furthermore, increased energy use is only a problem if that energy comes from environmentally damaging sources. Building energy sources other than fossil fuels allows for growing energy use with less environmental impact.
It's actually our response to Covid that really cemented the idea that we won't solve our environmental problems by asking people to consume less.
People weren't prepared to put on a mask to save their own lives, they are sure as hell not going to vote for a government with policies that result in them consuming less, just so that people of the future wont have to deal with climate change. It's too far away and somebody else's problem.
Degrowth will never willingly happen in a democratic country. In my view its a waste of time discussing.
As you said, we need to find solutions to our environment problems that will make people richer, more comfortable, with more stuff.
I should also add to this comment that I think every individual _should_ review their own consumption and debt, and I have a lot of respect for those that do minimize their footprint.
I also strongly support taxes and regulation that prevents people from consuming more than their fair share, or passing off the true cost of their consumption to others.
I only meant to say that government policies that ask people to consume less across the board will never fly.
> Increased energy usage is not necessarily necessary for increased economic growth
I disagree with this - economic growth has almost always perfectly aligned with increased energy use, however this is not a bad thing.
The history of the human race has been about moving from less dense sources of energy to higher dense ones. From wood, to charcoal, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear fission, to nuclear fusion. Abundance of energy is an absolute must for economic growth.
The good news is that what we have started to decouple our impact on the environment and economic growth.
I would also go as far as saying that economic growth is a necessity for us to combat climate change. The development of advanced technology like fusion, better desalination, higher density and more efficient farming, will all help reduce our impact on the planet.
It's not just density of energy. In a world of (close to) 100% renewable energy, what will the cost of electricity be relative to today? Framed another way; what's the cost of energy for someone who is "off the grid" today? Someone who is "off the grid" energy wise but connected digitally could have an uncapped impact on economic growth while having a hard cap on their impact on the environment/energy.
Society can combine renewable energy (which have a low per-unit cost) with dense fuel based energies like nuclear to drive the cost of energy towards 0., enabling new kinds of economic growth. For example, Proof of Work style crypto is something that's criticized = today for environmental reasons which, in that future world, would just be a siphon for excess energy. Replace crypto with "Folding@Home" style applications if you want.
Economic growth has been aligned with labor saving. Effiency.
So instead of carrying items by hand long distances, we get beasts of burden, eventually machines take over the job in more and more efficient ways. Self driving trucks delivering products massively increase productivity, but does not consume that much more electricity.
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.
And while the number of nukes has decreased, the number of nations, fingers on nuclear buttons if you will, has steadily increased ... as has the threat they pose (recently both the US and Russia have tried to demonstrate supersonic nuclear-capable missiles. And while neither nation currently appears capable of actually carrying out a strike using such means, obviously they're both not that far from a working system)
Countries don't decide to degrowth -- people are certainly not willing, right now, to make such decisions. Other people make those decisions and force them on people.
> but one doesn't play ball.
And why wouldn't some country play ball, if not because it's better for it to keep growing and take advantage of other countries' partial suicides?
All of this is premised on there being a current, extreme urgency for degrowth. The debates on that are hardly settled.
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 article itself puts relatively little focus on this, but it's very much part of the Zeitgeist in which Solow's work emerged.)
The tune further changed in the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of the environmental movement and the first major oil shocks, after which conventional economics increasingly adopted the viewpoint not only that growth was good but that it was inevitable. I've examined the foundations of those premises for some years and consistently find that there's distressingly little there there.
How much any of this is discussed in the books reviewed I'm not sure.
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.
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-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.
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.
And they will remain unpalatable as long as pensioners currently benefiting from the status quo (generous pensions paid in full, cheap healthcare etc) retain an absolute voting majority, which they will continue to do for several decades.
Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.
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.
> Pensioners, children and other unemployed must be protected by laws instead of direct political influence.
Of course then nothing stops those that have the vote because they work to disenfranchise those pensioners and other unemployed (the children will be theirs as well so are likely going to be protected).
Indeed, but I see the self-interest element in our democratic systems, showing its nasty face, now we have demographics that are bisecting on what is in the socity's future interest.
I don't see why/how disenfranchising a large chunk of people that have contributed to society would improve this. After all you'd be telling the people that are working hard to keep things afloat that if they succeed that they will lose the vote too unless they continue to work forever. The net effect will be that the social safety net and pension schemes will be ultimately cancelled because only those that work get to vote.
Unlikely, unless you somehow convince people who work that they will be able to work forever.
Common sense says that sooner or later health fails and not everyone can work the same amount.
"It can't happen to me" might work on teenagers.
The phrase "Ponzi scheme" is misused so much it has become meaningless.
A Ponzi scheme is a very specific type of fraud. Ever-increasing immigration to sustain a >1 worker-to-retiree ratio is more like a pyramid scheme, but one that will take decades or maybe a century to really stop working.
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.
This would seem to be only a temporary local solution. Once world population stabilizes or starts shrinking, you can only increase population by exporting the problem to somebody else.
"Good news"! Due to the climate crisis, large sections of the globe are likely to become uninhabitable, so even if world population declines, there will be an influx of refugees into habitable locations. In other words, local population density could easily increase worldwide even if there are fewer people overall.
I would rather have a runway of X + Y years to deal with these problems than X years, while more thoroughly mixing world culture in hopes of having a more cooperative society by then.
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 around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.
Why? They will and already are leading the charge on automation. Most people's jobs can be automated.
In this way, the US is like the Antebellum South, preferring servants driving their economy instead of adopting advances in tech, like the "North" in this metaphor (Japan) forced the necessity of creating.
Soon their pension and other systems in place to support their aging population will not be able to be supported by those working. Where will the money come from? There needs to be someone there to work. The labor force has to come from somewhere.
There are a lot of immigrants looking for jobs. Billions.
So Japan needs more people because their pension system is unsustainable. And when all the immigrants who came in get old, Japan will need even more immigration to make up for the immigration they had before, and all the new pensioners.
This is not sustainable. This is a Ponzi scheme. Continually kicking the can down the road.
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 pastures?
Who's going to lead them - they are. It's up to the citizens of those countries to select the government and policies that do not drive away their brains. Usually that means rejecting socialism.
So clear up my confusion: what should we do about it? Are we supposed to commit their human rights abuses for them, by denying entry to their best and brightest?
There are many ways this play out, and people in Western countries or not enough knowledge of the politics may not see it.
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).
>In contrast, it would be a terrible thing to forcibly lock people into their birth countries to stop brain drain.
This isn't hypothetical, of course. This is how places like the Soviet Union and East Germany worked. It was policy to literally shoot people trying to leave the country without permission. On the other hand, while certainly not justifying this atrocity, there certainly has been a "brain drain" as engineers, physicians, and scientists from the former Eastern Bloc have moved West for better employment opportunities.
You are confusing two things. Accepting immigrants is the humane thing to do.
Perpetuating economic inequality across the world is not.
Millions have to choose between working for meager salaries in one place or move to be exploited elsewhere. They are getting the short stick both ways.
What would "economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources" look like? You seem to be criticizing a current solution to a problem without suggesting an alternative solution.
Edit since I'm getting downvotes: I'll take a stab and hopefully someone will correct me. Do you mean a return to Mercantilism? If we can't have immigration because that is 'taking another nations resources,' then we must end up with some kind of Protectionism or Mercantilism? Or are you proposing a World Government?
That's what 'export led growth' is. It just works by hoarding money as 'foreign reserves', rather than using protectionism.
The entire world can't be using 'export led growth'. There has to be net importers to balance it out. Which currently are the US and the UK - the current and previous imperial nations.
There is no obligation to supply an alternative solution. Engineering taught me to define a problem without thinking of a solution, because it restricts your thinking.
That the person above didn’t bring a solution does not invalidate their statement. Immigration is only a solution for those getting the immigrants. It’s not so nice for the countries that raise and educate them without any ROI.
There's no obligation, but criticising the stutus quo without supplying an alternative is just stating that things are bad. Talking about how bad things are is pointless; why not talk about what could make things _better_?
If somethings broken and you can't fix it, then you either learn how to fix it or you need to accept that it is broken and move onto something you can fix.
P.s. I really like the engineering analogy, but remember when discussing politics: other people have probably already defined the problem and come up with solutions. As a citizen, we need to choose which solution is best; or promote our own solution.
> 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
There's no honour in getting your family killed by illiterate religious fanatics based on how your name sounds "for the greater good". So yes, the onus IS on those large collection of people (country) to recognise that their stone age era values and behaviours are driving away people who might give them a fighting chance to compete in the modern world.
Brain drain is a real phenomenon but may not be a real problem. I don't know of any country which is suffering or whose growth is hindered because of lack of brainpower.
No one is denying that it’s your right to move around. It doesn’t make it any less of a bad deal for your home country. They invested in you and you left. Do this a few million times and you feel the effect.
No one is blaming you. The person above just pointed out that immigration isn’t a free lunch.
They (birth country) didn’t invest in shit. It’s run by right wing extremists who at one point were less than 100m away ready to burn down our house and family alive. I’ll happily clean toilets in a different country than to go back to my “home” country. Its very difficult to wrap up your whole family and move to another country speaking a different language, betting your entire life savings in the process. But often the social climate and the people who adhere to those norms are so bad that any amount of effort to get away from it is acceptable.
> Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work.
What do you mean by this? Tokyo seems like a pretty successful case to me: relatively affordable housing even with net migration into the city, along with good public transit.
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.
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.
I suspect that you wouldn’t react as strongly to a smug assertion that the USA is a basket case.
It’s okay to admit that the US has done immigration well. It has. There are a great many things that Japan does better than the US. We can discuss them without taking umbrage.
Absolutely, thank you. I don't honestly care what Japan does. I'm not Japanese. I just think that the only realistic solution for them is to increase immigration.
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?
Immigration has MANY MANY issues. But it is the only realistic way to solve the issue of Japan's declining population. I do not think it is a silver bullet.
I mean Japan has a much lower crime rate than the US, and no massive opioid epidemic, huge homeless camps in the middle of major cities or elderly Asian people being randomly assaulted on the streets like the US does, so I don't know why it should follow in the footsteps of the US. The US should set an example that others want to follow.
I doubt Japan has a lower crime rate. You would have to look past just reported numbers. The US arrests a lot of people and Japan only pursues crimes they can solve 100% due to political reasons.
Reported homicide rates will 100% correspond to real homicide rates, and they are much lower in Japan.
I've also spent a lot of time in Tokyo and it feels dramatically safer. It shows in the little things too, like how clean the streets are. I remember one time seeing someone reserve their table at McDonalds by placing their credit card on it, something which is unthinkable in any US city.
Call it whatever you want but by and large people prefer to live around other people with whom they share the same culture and language. Even in countries with large amounts of immigration people self-segregate to be around people like themselves.
We are headed for a massive population collapse everywhere
Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement.
Japan, China, Europe, Russia.
The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?)
We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain.
Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population.
"Don't think of it as dying, think of it as beating the rush."
I suspect you may well be right but for different reasons: Societies have a life-cycle and there are quite a few of them that feel like they've passed their Zenith and are on the way down. I don't see how that can be reversed once it gains momentum and given the upside-down cost structure that we'll end up with collapse may be rather faster than how long it took to go up.
Immigration is just a shell game in this respect, though it may postpone the inevitable for a bit. Outsourcing manufacturing, food production and quite a few other critical components for a functioning society may yield short term gains but long term it isn't sustainable and the current perfect storm of war, climate change, covid and politics may well set off the avalanche.
I see this stated often, but it doesn't seem right to me. Almost any professional with a job offer from a Japanese company can get a work visa. Incoming software developers (and other in-demand workers) can probably rack up enough points to qualify as an HSFP/高度人材 and get permanent residence after 5 years. With enough points you can get it in one.
Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.
The US accepts a lower percentage of H1b applicants because the number of H1b visas is capped. Other entry routes are less restrictive—most notably via family reunification.
If immigration to Japan were to increase substantially enough, most likely things would change and it would not be so easy even for professionals to get work visas.
And keep in mind that the bulk of US immigration is not of professionals, but of unskilled workers and their families. The fact that the US is able to use immigration to fill population gaps at every economic level is the main reason that it is not facing the same demographic problems that the rest of the developed world is facing.
is it expected of skilled immigrants to be able to speak Japanese? getting people to learn the global lingua franca is a much easier sell. reading and writing Japanese at a fluent level takes quite a while and oodles of memorization.
>There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia.
Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation.
Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is).
>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.
Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either.
"Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
In what sense does the US “have a huge majority of blacks in jail”? This initially seemed hyperbolic and when I looked quickly at the numbers, it still seems hyperbolic.
The numbers are not as bad as GP implies, but still quite bad:
In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. And while Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, they accounted for 23% of inmates.
Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000).
Not as in a huge majority of black population in jail.
As in, a huge majority of blacks in jails (jail population being disproportionally black).
Blacks are about 40% of the jail population and 14% of the general population.
Even if this is because blacks indeed commit more crimes, this points to the conditions blacks are forced to live (discrimination, poorly funded school districts, redlining, trouble getting loans, etc.) that force them to do so. But we also know that traditionally courts treat blacks harsher (to the point of there being special laws against blacks for most of the 20th century, from Jim Crow to seggregation laws, and of course, seemingly neutral laws used covertly with much more force against blacks, like drug laws, three strikes, and so on).
I have been to Japan, I know people who are Japanese, and I know people who have successfully and unsuccessfully immigrated to Japan. This is all anecdotal, but they will all laugh and tell me in private that yeah, Japanese people (especially older generations) are extremely racist.
Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
Well, the US, unlike other huge countries (india, china, etc..) is not forcasted to have population decline in the next 100 years. This is primarily b/c of immigration.
Immigration to Japan pre-covid was about as strict as going to the US from EU. All countries restrict severely to skilled workers only. US has the bonus of not requiring a barely spoken language globally to integrate.
The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.
i think america is uniquely well suited to accept immigrants bc that's how we got made. one of the biggest things i learned talking to friends i made from outside our country is we don't even realize how much more diverse and accepting we are. like we've obviously got room to grow but looking at how europe is doing after letting in some immigrants is kinda startling.
I'll probably be downvoted because this is stupid but I was wondering the other day whether Japan will be the first country to start factory breeding of humans, Brave New World style. If there was ever a candidate for it, Japan is certainly it.
Is that a necessary result, or just a matter of how the economy was organized and money distributed? In other words, does politics and culture come into play in the result?
These are moderately interesting questions, but without some actual insight (preferably informed) it just sounds like you're being contrarian for no reason.
I think these are exceptionally interesting questions, and may suggest the solutions would include redistribution of the benefits of increased productivity from the capitalist class to society as a whole (a reversal of the trend we've seen since the 1970s in the "west").
Sorry, that number was pulled out of my ass, but the collapse is happening:
> In 1985, there were 7 working-age people for each dependent elderly person. By 2010, that number had dropped all the way to 2.8. Moreover, it is projected to fall even further: to 1.7 in 2035 and 1.3 in 2060.
Thing is, GDP is a lousy measure of growth. Japan is undergoing a contraction and fossilization of its social structure.
Interestingly enough, the same is happening slowly in USA and UK, and then after a big space everywhere else. Note the anti-immigration and austerity rhetoric, where what is needed is a major social change, considering of some attempts to level the playing field and prevent the current corporate and political aristocracies from emerging again.
Aa for rural drain, it's been happening everywhere, mostly because for some reason we do not pay farmers enough, nor the systems we made allow even groups of then to be self sufficient.
The move to rural could be countered by spreading, modernizing and connecting smaller hubs. Companies don't want to spread, so people don't want to spread, so companies don't want to spread, repeat ad infinitum.
US and UK hugely benefit from massive immigration. They are going to grow their population, contrary to what is going to happen in most of the western world.
From 2016 to 2060, the US is expected to grow by ~80M people [0], even though a big chunk of that growth (45%) will be for people who are 65 or older.
> an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty
Sounds like the rest of the Western world. We're not living in such a capitalist utopia over here either, are we?
I think most of us on this forum are sheltered from how the rest of the developed world lives, with our 250k a year and private health insurance. Because from what I see here in Europe it's a temp worker world and single mothers living in almost poverty, with a welfare state close to bankruptcy.
We don't have the jobs for life, in that you might be fired out of the blue, so I don't know which is worse in this case.
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 of the universe in 2000 years, the actually achievable interest rate must therefore be much lower than 3%, most likely closer to 0% than to 3%.
Before you argue that there will never be uninterrupted exponential growth, because of political instability and conflict, consider for a second that the inability to fulfill the endless exponential growth nonsense is the origin of the political instability and conflict.
No, growth can’t go forever, but how far can it go? Obviously your trillion galaxies is absurd, but there’s a lot of room between absurd scenarios and where we are now.
But ultimately that does just push back the question of how to deal with flattening of the curve. Even if we settled the whole solar system ala The Expanse, then what? Solar system scale Japanese style stagnation?
Most growth comes from inventing new things that induce demand. E.g. computers becoming efficient enough to be in everyone's pocket means _everyone wants one in their pocket._ (and thus GDP line goes up)
Thus to continuously grow we need to continuously turn the earth-matter we have available into more and more valuable things. Certainly it's not infinite, but I doubt we need to colonize another planet to keep up current growth rate for many centuries, we just need to prioritize knowledge generation (and thus inventions that increase value) over consumption. This usually only occurs during wartime, when existential threats to nations mean that knowledge generation is essential to survival.
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.
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."
Not really, they are just outsourcing resource intensive manufacturing processes to developing countries and then reimport the finished products thereby making it appear they achieve their growth by using less resources.
> by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’
No need to have some kind of "cultural revolution"?
>Endless growth – green or not
These arguments are all the same. They take the current rate of growth, plug in a time period longer than has elapsed since the death of vitalism as a theory of life (an idea which, today, is laughable to consider), and conclude that we need to stop growing immediately.
Obviously we have to stop growing at some point. The Sun produces a finite amount of power [1], the density of the Universe is very low, etc.
Why now? The eco-pessimists never answer this question, and that is because right now is the wrong time to stop growing. This article does not attempt to address it at all, but flings a few symbols around to put on the air of rigor. Bonus points for somehow managing to use the word "decolonise". At the current rate of growth, the right time would probably be in about 150 years. But the rate of growth has actually been slowing down over the last century, and will likely continue to gradually slow, as scientific discoveries continue to become more difficult. Taking that into account, the end of growth is probably half a millenium out, supposing a huge war or other disaster doesn't set us back.
I suspect the real reason people want to advocate for the end of growth now is because everyone wants to be a revolutionary; everyone wants to make the kind of great, world-shaking advancement that Einstein or Fleming or Borlaug did. To admit that while we probably have to stop growing, it won't be for a long time — that would be sort of dull. You can't sell books about it.
the main message I get from degrowthers is that we should, first and foremost, abandon the idea of growth as the driver of our economy. After we have assumed that growth is silly, we can start discussing about how a post-growth economy will look like. It's going to be a slow process, probably mostly guided through legislation.
The alternative is an increasing speed of crises and collapses (destroy and regrow).
Here's your answer: because if we continue on our current trajectory, in a mere 30-50 years, we will be experiencing significant effects of societal collapse due to climate change that make the current societal effects of ecological collapse we're experiencing (breakdown of supply chains, erosion of institutions, loss of biodiversity, record high global temperatures, etc.) seem like "the good old days." I'm talking "kids born today will die in a world that resembles Mad Max" kind of effects. We don't have 500 years to do something about that. We have to do it now.
>in a mere 30-50 years, we will be experiencing significant effects of societal collapse due to climate change
No, we won't. You have no evidence for this and nobody who studies the problem believes it. Furthermore, climate change doesn't work that way: the 50-year outlook is largely "baked in", and reforms made now are trying to change the 100-200-year outlook.
Go do your own research -- and I mean, real, honest research, not "I'm going go confirm my own ideological biases." Don't pretend you're here to be convinced by me. I've seen your post history.
I'm a physicist. I have friends who actually study climate science, as in, it's their job. I have spend my entire adult life paying attention to the problem. Nobody believes the kind of things you're claiming. There's a simple graph here:
It shows that if GHG emissions drop by 2/3 in ten years and disappear in 50, we get a +1.3 C difference in 80 years (2100), whereas "current policies" is a +2.9 C change. When you reduce that to 50 years, it gets narrower; climate change is doubly cumulative (CO2 accumulates, which drives the accumulation of heat). But in practice, we expect to reduce emissions while continuing to grow the economy, thanks to renewables. The actual 50-year difference between shutting off the economy and just building some goddamn solar panels is probably less than half a degree.
I'm not here to "be convinced" by you. I'm here to, hopefully, convince you to stop derailing the debate and making my side look silly. Climate change is a problem. It is a problem that needs to be taken seriously. It is not the end of human development.
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.
the thing is; scarcity will be created by us animals if we keep our current economic model. But it is also true that we are a bit more clever than most animals and we can at least try to manage if not avoid scarcity.
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.
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.
Fair enough on the intermediate step possibility. However, it is often sold more like a return to simpler lifestyles for forever - or maybe the proponents I encountered just happen to lean that way.
As far as dire scenarios are concerned, I struggle with them as usually the realities play out differently. Arguably in part because people do consider such scenarios.
Seems to me it is often portrayed that way by opponents strawmanning it or by media simply very lossily compressing it into a few sentences/seconds chunks. But I'm not sure how many of the proponents really have that view. Even in cases where degrowth writers have "simple life forever!" type phrasings my impression is that that's not really the focus of their work and they're not really strongly wedded to such a vision for the long term. Their core focus is the imminent (as in 100 years) negative externalities, not the long future after that.
I think Jason Hickel is an interesting case. I've learned a lot from reading both his work and that of his critics. His "What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification" is a good intro to his thinking[0]. I think very little there is really incompatible with expansion into space in the longer term.
Direct thermal forcing is at about 100mW/m^2. This gives us about a century to stop increasing energy usage and albedo.
This is precisely where we were when people first started raising alarm bells about greenhouse gases.
The thermal emissivity of the night side of earth is only one of many limits we are running head first into. Almost all scarce resources, many abundant ones, and even abstract concepts like the growth of classical computation are all hitting limits where they only scale linearly or worse with energy input.
Growing into the solar system is largely irrelevant because it's a constant increase vs an exponential and will not be meaningfully coupled to earth's economy without energy expendature on earth proportional to trade volume. And there's no compelling reason to hinge everything on the assumption that the second law of thermodynamics and speed of light are both false so nothing outside the solar system is relevant to those living inside it unless we overturn one or both first.
All of this to avoid reexamining the blind faith assumption that we have to give an exponentially growing share of the pie to those who have the biggest share. Growth is only necessary for survival of the 99.99% if every year they give 2% of their wealth to the 0.01%
Once we build and make stuff truly not on earth it will decouple. The trade never reaches earth then, so overall human economy expands but not earth's (or only a little, ie high value trade, maybe even take some high waste energy processes off earth if energy from dropping product back is less).
The human economy could be much larger but not all parts of the human sphere would necessarily trade with each other materially.
Edit: "materially" in the sense of stuff. Some data from a nearby star could still be highly valuable, but exchanging stuff over lightyears might rarely be efficient.
So then earth still has to degrow even for the short duration before the carrying capacity of the solar system gets exhausted. The presence or absence of a growing economy elsewhere is irrelevant.
You ask why now? The answer is because we've already overshot the ability to do everything we do sustainably with the resources available. We need to get off the treadmill now and hope like hell technology and the available buffers are enough to limit the harm to 'merely' hundreds of millions dying.
Definitely not degrowth, maybe low growth if high energy stuff cannot be moved off planet and results transported back with low heat impact. (Or no other ways of cooling are found).
Also, for example, innovation from growing economies elsewhere can reach back to earth. Expensive stuff that relies on growth can continue to happen and the results shared.
Carrying capacity of the solar system is huge, so quite some growth to be captured there. Once it is exhausted, growth for earth and the solar system might slow down because information will have significant travel time. And we haven't even exhausted earth and earth will become uninhabitable ultimately anyway so terminal sustainability is not truly needed.
This entails growth in most primary industries also ending, as well as a large reduction in many.
This is incompatible with a system where people starve and everything breaks whenever growth goes below 2%.
"Stop giving everything to the people who already have stuff so we need the pie to grow at an exponential rate just to keep the share that goes to 99.99% of the world constant" isn't a hard concept.
The raw heat output of humanity divided by area of earth.
GHG is bad because it produces single digit watts of forcing (captured solar heat that would otherwise escape).
Direct thermal forcing from either capturing sunlight (making the surface darker) or emitting heat from nuclear derived (or in short term, fossil fuels before they run out) sources is just as catastrophic, but further off.
We can happily replace our current energy needs with nuclear and renewable, but we're just back at square one if we don't end growth.
I think part of the answer could be that the global population is older and wealthier than it ever has been. This has certain effects on our collective psychology.
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.
degrowth is unavoidable: population will stop growing soon and natural resources cannot be exploited at the same rate as they are now. So we'd better prepare for a nice and managed post-growth world or we'll face the worst consequences of it.
If you admit that a carbon tax would make us both richer and greener, then you're welcome to argue that on top of that we could do more.
If you can't admit that clearly, then it's just more climate denial: oh it's too expensive to fix, we have to keep giving money to Russia, because insulation and heat pumps are a hoax.
I'd support a carbon tax that's pegged to the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere in some way, and rises exponentially with a linear increase in concentration.
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.
Even the degrowth in japan is subsidized with growth in other regions. Real degrowth is instability, is human nature going feral back to religous roots, make many copies, fight the outsiders unbelievers, recover make many copies.
Cycling this drain, decomplexifies societies, loosing the ability to supply bureaucracy, research and experiments.
Lots of countries worldwide partially circle or circled in this loop.
One can not fix a situation, one does not talk and observe objectively. This includes disabilitys of the species as a system constraint.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadThe 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 but understand it would be incredibly nasty. I think most people drastically underestimate how fucked up the world would be if GDP and population fell by 1% annually for the next 10 years.
(I mean, if it doesn’t it’s not for lack of us trying. I just don’t see it as something to look forward to.)
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.
As opposed to what? A carbon based life form? A monster truck?
Yes literally every thing that humans interact with that isn't constructed of atoms is a social construct. Contracts, agreements, trades, transactions. Every single concept in finance and economics. This isn't a profound statement
A debt, by contrast, is a socially-recognised and generally legally sanctioned claim on another's wealth or productivity. That is, debt is fundamentally informational, and records a relationship, but that relationship is not fundamentally grounded in any underlying physical reality. As is noted, "debts that cannot be repaid won't", and when the notional fiction runs up against such a reality, the debt is retired. That is, the information is changed.
There are numerous cultural, legal, and financial reasons to believe and behave otherwise, but ultimately, debts are a social, not a natural or intrinsic construct. Their behaviour is ultimately more a symptom than a cause of a larger growth or collapse.
Debt wants growth, but need not have it. The principle challenge is that the modern monetary system based on central banks and fiat currencies was developed in a world of rapid economic growth. It need not be limited to such a world. Currency sovereigns can both retire debts and introduce new liquidity to maintain a flow which supports commercial transactions. A major problem to date has been that new liquidity introductions tend to be to the wealth-holding classes rather than those requiring currency to pay for current and essential demand and consumption. Again, there are historical reasons for this, but they are still cultural and notional, not some underlying Law of the Universe.
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.
No, but it's antithetical to everything we think and believe for Capital to not take its profits before everyone else.
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.
There's "rich people" buying houses, which are investment funds that buy property to rent - that is still availalbe on the market and isn't decreasing the supply of housing.
Rich people buying homes for personal use can't have an appreciable effect on pricing. You couldn't afford a billionaire's eighth home in whatever city even if it were available for sale anyway.
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?
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 health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
edit: 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.
That's entirely up for discussion. Civilization has imposed a lot of choices on you that you may not like.
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.
You just said the right to not be a slave is a made-up right.
> it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire
So don’t? — but you’re losing me at the point you go from “I save money by not tracking exceptions” to “I have the right to make you participate because I want your money”.
Which is my point: you’re not differentiating between the two, while asserting that you don’t have the same rights in one case.
Slavery was also the law.
I agree with this statement. Actually, I consider this more of a principle than a right. Society should aim to minimize the degree to which it imposes the will of the government on the citizens, not fundamentally because freedom is an a priori right, but because it leads to a more peaceful society.
A society where the citizens do not tolerate would be tyrants that want to excessively dictate how people live, tends to be (EDIT) more stable, innovative or economically competitive over time.
Citizens of a freedom-loving society may not all understand this from first principles. Even if most believe they have such a right somewhat dogmatically, it may still have the same outcome.
Dogmatism may come with the downside of seeing people with different opinions as evil, though, and may sometimes lead to needless conflict.
That discussion has been settled in the West, at least for now. In many places, the discussion is still ongoing, and in fact, they are an estimated 40 million slaves (or similarly bonded people) on Earth today, or about 10x as many as in the US South in 1860.
I find it a bit funny that in an increasingly atheistic society, some Christian values are held even more axiomatically than ever before, and racism is particular
Statues of American founders get torn down due to some link to it. Imagine if everything around the world with some link to forced labor would be given the same treatment. We would have to remove almost every ancient monument or statue from Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, India, China, former Aztec and Inka peoples, just to mention a few.
Also most ancient works of writing, from all over the globe would have to be given introduction with warning that the author may have owned slaves or benefitted from slave labor.
I'm not American. I did not grow up with the legacy of American slavery. By no means do I endorse slavery, but when reading about Aristotle's ideas about slavery, I'm able to imagine a world where slavery is seen as normal. In many cases, those who lost some war would end up as slaves. But typically, that would go both ways. Whichever side won would enslave the other.
I have trouble seeing almost every inhabitant of classical Europe, the Middle East or North Africa as evil just because they either did own slaves, or would have owned slaves had they been able to.
Just like I have trouble seeing a Lion or Hyena as evil for eating a Zebra. (Ok, maybe I can see the Hyena as evil, mainly because they're ugly ;)
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.
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.
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.
Degrowth as used in the OP article is about macro level policy. For example solar panel subsidies, taxing coal and investments in public transportation.
Individual actions performed in the name of "growth mindset" (whatever that means) can like any other actions be stopped, and likely will be stopped if they cause harm to others.
In capitalism, these are entrepreneurs. In democracy, these are politicians. In autocracy, these are dictators, army generals. In theocracy, these are pharaos, etc. In nature, these are alpha wolves.
Even people proposing degrowth, if they're going to achieve their goal, will have to be power hungry, alpha wolves (no matter how they will market themselves), not that different from people I describe. And they will have to fight constantly. There is no way how to stop need for getting better, getting more, competing, winning...
>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.
This isn’t even close to what I said — in fact, it’s the complete opposite.
You can re-read my original comment, which is about others forcing their choices onto me.
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.
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.
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.
An emergency fund of 10k barely covers the 8k average deductible for a family. Ignoring things like rent, food, etc, all rapidly increasing.
To have a worthwhile emergency fund is too costly for most americans. Might as well finance a car - it won't matter.
"I could die tomorrow, so it doesn't matter what I do today." is not a healthy way of thinking.
Spending less, eating healthy, learning useful stuff, exercising more and building good social relations with your family, community and professional contacts are all factors that improve the likelihood of positive outcomes.
You could still die (or end up broke and sick) tomorrow. There could even be nuclear war, for all I know. Or you could rent a Ferrari, spend a week drinking, gambling and whoring in Las Vegas, and end up meeting a person at the poker table that will make you rich, but the probability is low. (Unless you're already rich or famous.)
If you live humbly and healthily from you're 20 to you're 50, you may already have saved up enough buffer that from then on, you work because you want to, not because you have to (even on a median salary). If you go on until you're 70, you probably have enough for one more generation to have a jump start on the same level of safety, if they follow your example.
Though in my experience, families who follow such values over multiple generations are already wealthy, and often quite rich. Living with dignity well within their means, and not flaunting wealth in public, are some of the main hallmarks of "old money".
That's not for you to decide. The market can and does apply proper growth slowing pressure by itself.
> Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn.
That's just a different version of "think of the poor who can't eat". Countries and cultures aren't the same. Suburbia only exists due to improper distribution of business centers and housing bubbles. Overpopulated mega-cities don't have to exist with proper distribution of work and living space. Majority of countries are uninhabited and undeveloped.
> What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security.
Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.
> 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.
Firing is necessary to keep efficiency and competition.
> Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
Who will "supply security"? People who work and who are getting paid so they buy stuff. Who pays and produce their stuff? Other people who need to work. The demand for "security" will only keep increasing due to comfort. There's a reason Bill Clinton was elected on a platform to reform the welfare system.
> We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
And flowers and unicorns too.
This is always a dubious comparison to me. Why are you poor people worried about the continued lack of atonomy you experience due to a lack of ownership in modern society? The state will give you penecilin. The duke of dorkingshire might have looked like he was doing well but he did have gout to contend with.
Here take this pill and boom life extension is on a different level than this is my carrot and even though I have 100's you can't have any.
The first will lead to bankruptcy the second to riots.
The most bizarre argument I've encountered yet.
Without going too much in detail, the "customers" cannot have perfect information regarding the treatment or course of action that's most convenient for them at a given moment, and they cannot freely decide when (or often whether) to make use of the service or not—"It's probably best I get appendicitis now that I can afford it rather than wait until next year".
Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?
Where have I come even close to suggesting it would? Perfect information, to the extent it can be possible, is a requirement for a market to be efficient. What you call "socialist medicine" is by definition not a market, so perfect information is a moot point.
What universal healthcare can provide is the adequate incentives for providing early diagnosis, promoting preventative medicine, and giving safe and effective treatment. Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?
Furthermore, pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line, and who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered. This already happens to an extent under the current U.S. model. There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.
This is simply not true, as I said, risk factors into every price.
> Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?
Don't you feel any incentive to take care of yourself with early diagnosis and prevention?
> pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line
Just like if you're hungry. But food in a free market is cheap and plentiful.
> who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered.
The beauty of the free market is the consumer gets to decide who to trust.
> There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.
The US had a free market in health care up to the 1960s, and there's no evidence of the dark predictions you make for it.
So I compared it to communism.
If you have something else to compare it to, feel free.
Of course, there's that ultimate hammer of greenhouse gases everybody is using daily, but besides these it is hard to confirm this. And these have also many positive externalities (access to plastics, cheap energy) that cannot be ignored, otherwise we would live in carbon-zero economy already.
I'm lucky that I don't rely on our national health service for everything but I still gladly pay towards it's running so others can use it. Of all the things the government taxes me for directly or indirectly payments towards the national health care service ranks very low on the list of annoyances.
"How American Health Care Killed My Father"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
compares the free market section of the health care system with the rest of it.
Also, social benefits like protection against medical bankruptcy, universal coverage, and others are known to have a net positive impact.
However, I believe that their lack of security is due to their lack of power, and that their lack of power is due to their lack of wealth, their loans and that they do not own the companies in which they work.
Consequently I see wealth and power as effectively the same and become moderately unhappy when I see policies that will in any way reduce the wealth or power of ordinary people.
So, while I used the word 'conditions' I actually meant their state of subjugation.
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 heritage:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-steady-stater-7232427...
A more useful framing of the question might be to assume that degrowth is a given, whether you believe this or not, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns.
The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth and absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms which notes that the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now), without reallocation.
But wealth and livelihood allocation are social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, several times.
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.
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 must take more pills. If you stop taking the pills, the leech will outpace your body growth and your body will suffer from anemia despite having more blood in your body than the average healthy human.
Suddenly everyone gets a fetish for being as large as an possible, it is good for your health, nobody ever questions whether they should just get rid of the leech and get their body to a normal height.
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?
However, historical counter-examples of zero-growth democracies are limited. We might look to the Greeks or Romans as examples of democracy in the antiquities; but there's two problems with that:
1. Their democracies were limited, with no universal suffrage and very low citizenship rates.
2. They had economic growth anyway. Rome in particular was as addicted to military conquest then as America is to oil today.
Selectorate theory[0] would argue this point in the opposite direction; i.e. that strict dictatorships squander economic growth. Political and economic franchise are inherently linked: people who cannot vote will have their livelihoods taken away from them, while those who produce the economy's goods will eventually demand political power themselves. Democracies are ultimately the means by which we distribute political power among the people, and that is itself a reflection of the distribution of economic production. If you give the people political power, the economy can't help but to grow as they are no longer being shackled.
But I think there's an even simpler argument than that. If the economy is zero-growth, then the only way for an individual to improve their living conditions is to make someone else's worse. This turns the economy into a zero-sum game of who can monopolize everything the fastest, which spikes income inequality, which makes it easier to disenfranchise voters, and eventually results in the ossification of social and political structures (since you shut up everyone that you said didn't matter).
[0] Excellently summarized by CGP Grey here: https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/rules-for-rulers based on a book called The Dictator's Handbook
Every individual live in something like an ecosystem. I would argue that society is part of the ecosystem for humans.
Whether or not (or in what cases) one individual should be forced to give up resources to another will be a never-ending discussion. Should government money be used for development aid abroad? For social welfare domestically? Are you responsible for caring for your parents? Your sibling? Your children? Is a mother responsible for providing her biological resources to an unborn child?
We may never come to permanent, full agreement on most of these questions.
I would put much of the finance industry in that bracket, which is essentially a rent seeking industry (albeit in various convoluted ways). It's doubly bad in finance because it sucks huge amounts of talent from areas where the individuals could actually contribute usefully.
Or think about it this way, when there is no growth left, you must actually get people to cooperate with each other and as far as I know we never learned how to do that.
Why is that?
It is OK to take from the very rich to help the very poor.
All the stories I have read say that the general wealth is increasing but distribution getting more skewed.
So I do not think endless growth is the answer to maintaining the middle class
"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")
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 quite interested in hearing from those who've read one or all of these, and if there were some way to invoke MacBeth's weird sisters, and agree when we three (or however many) should meet again to discuss them ... would be of interest.
There actually was a proposal for an HN book club ... 14 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067
Any interest now, and suggestions on how to structure this, would be appreciated.
HN used to have book recommendation posts pretty often, but maybe we’ve gotten less literary over time. I’ve read about a dozen books that were recommended here and they were all awesome.
Thought I'd have that discussion here as well, though.
The earlier thread addresses a number of thoughts / concerns / possibilities.
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?
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" could, on the other hand, decide to impose taxes on individuals that consume more than their fair share.
Just wondering about the impact of such structure and what would happen if businesses/people decided to use something different.
Closer to home the "inflation reduction act" spends $20 billion to put farmland out of farm use, and also implement incentives to force farmers to significantly reduce production.
This will cause food shortages like it already has in Sri Lanka. Expect huge spikes in food prices like we've seen for gas.
Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
> Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.
The US has barely built refineries over the last 3 decades. This is not a new phenomenon.
> Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.
Can you point this out in the bill so I can read it?
In the meantime here you can see the catastrophic effect of Sri Lankan style ESG policies in the Netherlands, as projected by their finance ministry. Netherlands is the 5th largest food exporter in the world.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/07/ministry-figures-sugge...
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.
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...
So you're saying this did not contribute to the food shortage (a drop in domestic production of rice)?
Or you're saying this drop in production would've happened irrespective of the fertilizer ban?
1 https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-sri-lanka-is-having-an...
asabjorn's claim was that ag productivity was directly sabotaged.
That is a highly unlikely reading of a situation I see as:
1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.
2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.
3. Resulting ground truth was that ag productivity collapsed, as you note.
Again, the driver was not "let's de-grow the economy", but "we can't afford what we had". In the context of other comments I've made on this thread, what Sri Lanka are experiencing might better be interpreted as an unplanned collapse rather than a longer-term, planned, and engineered de-growth. Sri Lanka's fertiliser ban itself was a consequence, not a driver, of unplanned collapse.
The usual poster-child of the alternative viewpoint might be Cuba. That country also saw a dramatic reduction in foreign support when its patron state the Soviet Union itself collapsed. There was a dramatic and difficult period of adjustment, but the result has been a stable and sufficient existence, if not one at notional OECD / major industrialised nation levels of wealth and income.
In your reuters link seem to contradict your claim: "The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilisers in Sri Lanka". It was officially rolled back after protests, but "only a trickle of chemical fertilisers made it to farms" so it sounds like supply lines acted as if they were still in place.
> 1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.
That doesn't seem like a great excuse for banning fertilizer, or an explanation for why after rollback of ban only a "only a trickle" of fertilizer was available. The claims in my source and reuters seems to be that the supply was not there, not that fertilizer prices were high. Do you have any source saying fertilizer was available at much higher cost?
> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...
Regardless of competency in Sri Lankas governments execution they have been working with WEF on their sustainable farming goals for a while. This agenda seek to ban fertilizer, make us all eat bugs instead of meat and move to organic farming.
Getting a high ESG score due to meeting sustainability goals grants benefits when getting loans, Sri Lankas is 98, so I share your intuition that a huge contributing factor is that they really need those loans due to long term mismanagement.
As I've pointed out elsewhere other WEF sustainable farming aligned governments such as the Dutch have implemented very similar policies and as abruptly, triggering the same kind of large scale protests and dire outcomes: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/07/ministry-figures-sugge...
I am at this point taking WEF seriously, as real-world negative outcomes does not seem to stop implementation of their catastrophic tyrannical policies.
According to one estimate, the president’s agrochemical ban was poised to save Sri Lanka the $400 million it was spending yearly on synthetic fertilizer, money it could use toward increasing imports of other goods. But Rajapaksa also argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were leading to “adverse health and environmental impacts” and that such industrial farming methods went against the country’s heritage of “sustainable food systems.”
And:
“Sri Lanka started subsidizing fertilizers in the 1960s and we saw that rice yields tripled,” says Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a US-based environmental nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...
The goal was cost savings. It proved misled.
But again, the snowballing economic and fiscal crisis prompted the ban, rather than the other way around.
The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold.
While there are just 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 15 million of the country’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.
This article should give you the context and data points showing you do not have all the information
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behi...
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.
That said the ESG actions is clearly correlated in the data with 1/3 of farmland laying dormant in 2021, crop losses and yield issues. Many of us won’t forget Sri Lanka was touted by WEF as a ESG poster child before it went south.
This article links to supporting data
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behi...
Shellenberger who you link to is "A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them.[2][3] Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, calling them "bad science" and "inaccurate"." (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger )
Since he describes a catastrophic reality caused directly by very real government policies, this can't just be discounted as a fabricated narrative.
De-growth people will cause mass worldwide starvation in the next 6 months, and the policies are implemented in tyrannical ways so these are tyrants and will soon be murderous tyrants.
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 daily lives meaningfully.
We will likely die for the lack of philosophy.
Mankind is not malicious, just malignant.
You might want to build an evil AI to swallow the fly.
I don't believe that one follows from the other. Humanity is part of nature. Humans are sentient, and groups of humans can decide that society and/or group systems should ideally behave in one way or another, e.g. that an economy can be organized in one way or another. Humans can also make models about the future, and make statistical predictions based upon current (sophisticated) understanding of how systems work. This sets humans apart from other organisms in nature which also operate un(or less)consciously in groups, such as ants, viruses, etc, and which have growth that is unchecked to the extent that resources permit.
Therefore, it doesn't follow that humans being part of nature implies that unchecked growth is inevitable; humanity recognizing that there are in fact finite resources on this planet which we're currently bound to, and attempting to tailor the systems which affect rate of growth to ensure sufficient runway with those resources, is a very pro-humanity thing to do. That is, some control of population and resource-usage with the goal of preventing resource and environmental exhaustion and subsequent mass calamity is a tradeoff that attempts to promote the longevity of reasonable living standards with the possible expense of some liberties and the possible reining in of some unthinking consumption patterns. That doesn't equate to misanthropy, any more than preventing a 3 year old from eating a fourth bowl of ice cream does.
Yes. This is how you bring down the cost of food to get it to enough people.
I'm not convinced that it quite extends to the entire spectrum of junk food, though. Processing oreos (feel free to replace with anything else) quite so much may bring the cost down, but I doubt that it actually does anything to feed people.
There are also quite probably systemic responses, including (though I'd suggest not limited to) the emergence of global epidemics and pandemics of disease and dysfunction. Kyle Harper's recent book, The Fate of Rome, advances the case that diseases co-evolve with civilisation. This itself becomes an interesting counterpoint to the well-worn argument that science, technology, and progress have relieved humans of the evils of infectious disease. It was progress, population growth, commerce, and urbanisation which created those plagues in the first place. As Jarred Diamond noted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was the Old World with its crowded cities and vast commercial networks which introduced plagues to the New (with a very few possible exceptions, and those largely very slow-moving insults).
Though of course, diseases of the tropics were well-known. Those however are overwhelmingly zoonotic and parasite-based rather than trasmitting directly between humans, and reflect the same dynamics (huge populations and intense intercourse) though of other species, typically insects. Diseases of sanitation and hygiene, notably cholera, would be the other principle exception, though that was introduced to Europe largely from the Indian subcontinent.
Again, the point isn't that degrowth is an option to BAU, it's an option to a far worse collapse or oppressive wealth concentration with massive disenfranchisement. The fact that discussing the issue in these terms an on this basis is so readily derailed is itself among the profound challenges in achieving a non-worst-case outcome. I've pointed before to the work of William Ophuls (Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, Plato's Revenge) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (various) before, I'll recommend them without reservation here again.
People weren't prepared to put on a mask to save their own lives, they are sure as hell not going to vote for a government with policies that result in them consuming less, just so that people of the future wont have to deal with climate change. It's too far away and somebody else's problem.
Degrowth will never willingly happen in a democratic country. In my view its a waste of time discussing.
As you said, we need to find solutions to our environment problems that will make people richer, more comfortable, with more stuff.
I also strongly support taxes and regulation that prevents people from consuming more than their fair share, or passing off the true cost of their consumption to others.
I only meant to say that government policies that ask people to consume less across the board will never fly.
I disagree with this - economic growth has almost always perfectly aligned with increased energy use, however this is not a bad thing.
The history of the human race has been about moving from less dense sources of energy to higher dense ones. From wood, to charcoal, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear fission, to nuclear fusion. Abundance of energy is an absolute must for economic growth.
The good news is that what we have started to decouple our impact on the environment and economic growth.
I would also go as far as saying that economic growth is a necessity for us to combat climate change. The development of advanced technology like fusion, better desalination, higher density and more efficient farming, will all help reduce our impact on the planet.
I fail to see how this is true in any meaningful sense.
Society can combine renewable energy (which have a low per-unit cost) with dense fuel based energies like nuclear to drive the cost of energy towards 0., enabling new kinds of economic growth. For example, Proof of Work style crypto is something that's criticized = today for environmental reasons which, in that future world, would just be a siphon for excess energy. Replace crypto with "Folding@Home" style applications if you want.
Countries don't decide to degrowth -- people are certainly not willing, right now, to make such decisions. Other people make those decisions and force them on people.
> but one doesn't play ball.
And why wouldn't some country play ball, if not because it's better for it to keep growing and take advantage of other countries' partial suicides?
All of this is premised on there being a current, extreme urgency for degrowth. The debates on that are hardly settled.
(The article itself puts relatively little focus on this, but it's very much part of the Zeitgeist in which Solow's work emerged.)
The tune further changed in the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of the environmental movement and the first major oil shocks, after which conventional economics increasingly adopted the viewpoint not only that growth was good but that it was inevitable. I've examined the foundations of those premises for some years and consistently find that there's distressingly little there there.
How much any of this is discussed in the books reviewed I'm not sure.
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-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.
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.
Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.
Of course then nothing stops those that have the vote because they work to disenfranchise those pensioners and other unemployed (the children will be theirs as well so are likely going to be protected).
Laws are indirectly made by those who vote!
A Ponzi scheme is a very specific type of fraud. Ever-increasing immigration to sustain a >1 worker-to-retiree ratio is more like a pyramid scheme, but one that will take decades or maybe a century to really stop working.
What happens when due to immigration or rising standards the immigration tap runs dry?
Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work.
We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.
In this way, the US is like the Antebellum South, preferring servants driving their economy instead of adopting advances in tech, like the "North" in this metaphor (Japan) forced the necessity of creating.
There are a lot of immigrants looking for jobs. Billions.
This is not sustainable. This is a Ponzi scheme. Continually kicking the can down the road.
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 pastures?
In contrast, it would be a terrible thing to forcibly lock people into their birth countries to stop brain drain.
What portion of this is non-voluntary?
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.
This isn't hypothetical, of course. This is how places like the Soviet Union and East Germany worked. It was policy to literally shoot people trying to leave the country without permission. On the other hand, while certainly not justifying this atrocity, there certainly has been a "brain drain" as engineers, physicians, and scientists from the former Eastern Bloc have moved West for better employment opportunities.
Perpetuating economic inequality across the world is not.
Millions have to choose between working for meager salaries in one place or move to be exploited elsewhere. They are getting the short stick both ways.
Nice strawman there.
Edit since I'm getting downvotes: I'll take a stab and hopefully someone will correct me. Do you mean a return to Mercantilism? If we can't have immigration because that is 'taking another nations resources,' then we must end up with some kind of Protectionism or Mercantilism? Or are you proposing a World Government?
That's what 'export led growth' is. It just works by hoarding money as 'foreign reserves', rather than using protectionism.
The entire world can't be using 'export led growth'. There has to be net importers to balance it out. Which currently are the US and the UK - the current and previous imperial nations.
That the person above didn’t bring a solution does not invalidate their statement. Immigration is only a solution for those getting the immigrants. It’s not so nice for the countries that raise and educate them without any ROI.
If somethings broken and you can't fix it, then you either learn how to fix it or you need to accept that it is broken and move onto something you can fix.
P.s. I really like the engineering analogy, but remember when discussing politics: other people have probably already defined the problem and come up with solutions. As a citizen, we need to choose which solution is best; or promote our own solution.
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
There's a lot of brains draining from Russia right now due to Putin's policies. Should we deport them all back to Russia?
It is a problem for a nation-state whether you assume that nation-state owns the brains of their citizens or not.
> There's a lot of brains draining from Russia right now due to Putin's policies. Should we deport them all back to Russia?
Nobody said anything like that. You should respond to what was written and not to what is in your head.
No one is denying that it’s your right to move around. It doesn’t make it any less of a bad deal for your home country. They invested in you and you left. Do this a few million times and you feel the effect.
No one is blaming you. The person above just pointed out that immigration isn’t a free lunch.
> immigration is just colonial appropriation
Thank you America for colonially appropriating me from starvation under communism.
What do you mean by this? Tokyo seems like a pretty successful case to me: relatively affordable housing even with net migration into the city, along with good public transit.
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.
People are allowed to have opinions that something would be a good course of action or not. That's not paternalism.
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.
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.
It’s okay to admit that the US has done immigration well. It has. There are a great many things that Japan does better than the US. We can discuss them without taking umbrage.
I've also spent a lot of time in Tokyo and it feels dramatically safer. It shows in the little things too, like how clean the streets are. I remember one time seeing someone reserve their table at McDonalds by placing their credit card on it, something which is unthinkable in any US city.
Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement.
Japan, China, Europe, Russia.
The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?)
We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain.
Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population.
Japan is just a bit ahead of the rest of us.
I suspect you may well be right but for different reasons: Societies have a life-cycle and there are quite a few of them that feel like they've passed their Zenith and are on the way down. I don't see how that can be reversed once it gains momentum and given the upside-down cost structure that we'll end up with collapse may be rather faster than how long it took to go up.
Immigration is just a shell game in this respect, though it may postpone the inevitable for a bit. Outsourcing manufacturing, food production and quite a few other critical components for a functioning society may yield short term gains but long term it isn't sustainable and the current perfect storm of war, climate change, covid and politics may well set off the avalanche.
Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.
If immigration to Japan were to increase substantially enough, most likely things would change and it would not be so easy even for professionals to get work visas.
And keep in mind that the bulk of US immigration is not of professionals, but of unskilled workers and their families. The fact that the US is able to use immigration to fill population gaps at every economic level is the main reason that it is not facing the same demographic problems that the rest of the developed world is facing.
Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation.
Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is).
>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.
Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either.
"Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. And while Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, they accounted for 23% of inmates.
Another way of considering racial and ethnic differences in the nation’s prison population is by looking at the imprisonment rate, which tallies the number of prisoners per 100,000 people. In 2017, there were 1,549 black prisoners for every 100,000 black adults – nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites (272 per 100,000) and nearly double the rate for Hispanics (823 per 100,000).
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
As in, a huge majority of blacks in jails (jail population being disproportionally black).
Blacks are about 40% of the jail population and 14% of the general population.
Even if this is because blacks indeed commit more crimes, this points to the conditions blacks are forced to live (discrimination, poorly funded school districts, redlining, trouble getting loans, etc.) that force them to do so. But we also know that traditionally courts treat blacks harsher (to the point of there being special laws against blacks for most of the 20th century, from Jim Crow to seggregation laws, and of course, seemingly neutral laws used covertly with much more force against blacks, like drug laws, three strikes, and so on).
It didn't for the natives of the islands they call Nippon, either.
> They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
So did the Ainu.
(And Ainu had it better, despite the strong discrimination against them, than native americans and blacks in the US).
Even the UN says Japan is racist!! https://web.archive.org/web/20070329065052/http://www.unic.o...
Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.
Is that a necessary result, or just a matter of how the economy was organized and money distributed? In other words, does politics and culture come into play in the result?
This is about social welfare and policy as opposed to "let the market sort it out".
> In 1985, there were 7 working-age people for each dependent elderly person. By 2010, that number had dropped all the way to 2.8. Moreover, it is projected to fall even further: to 1.7 in 2035 and 1.3 in 2060.
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a01001/
Interestingly enough, the same is happening slowly in USA and UK, and then after a big space everywhere else. Note the anti-immigration and austerity rhetoric, where what is needed is a major social change, considering of some attempts to level the playing field and prevent the current corporate and political aristocracies from emerging again.
Aa for rural drain, it's been happening everywhere, mostly because for some reason we do not pay farmers enough, nor the systems we made allow even groups of then to be self sufficient.
From 2016 to 2060, the US is expected to grow by ~80M people [0], even though a big chunk of that growth (45%) will be for people who are 65 or older.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Sounds like the rest of the Western world. We're not living in such a capitalist utopia over here either, are we?
I think most of us on this forum are sheltered from how the rest of the developed world lives, with our 250k a year and private health insurance. Because from what I see here in Europe it's a temp worker world and single mothers living in almost poverty, with a welfare state close to bankruptcy.
We don't have the jobs for life, in that you might be fired out of the blue, so I don't know which is worse in this case.
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 of the universe in 2000 years, the actually achievable interest rate must therefore be much lower than 3%, most likely closer to 0% than to 3%.
Before you argue that there will never be uninterrupted exponential growth, because of political instability and conflict, consider for a second that the inability to fulfill the endless exponential growth nonsense is the origin of the political instability and conflict.
But ultimately that does just push back the question of how to deal with flattening of the curve. Even if we settled the whole solar system ala The Expanse, then what? Solar system scale Japanese style stagnation?
Most growth comes from inventing new things that induce demand. E.g. computers becoming efficient enough to be in everyone's pocket means _everyone wants one in their pocket._ (and thus GDP line goes up) Thus to continuously grow we need to continuously turn the earth-matter we have available into more and more valuable things. Certainly it's not infinite, but I doubt we need to colonize another planet to keep up current growth rate for many centuries, we just need to prioritize knowledge generation (and thus inventions that increase value) over consumption. This usually only occurs during wartime, when existential threats to nations mean that knowledge generation is essential to survival.
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.
- 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."
It's worth noting that the two articles are written by the same person, Noah Smith.
No need to have some kind of "cultural revolution"?
>Endless growth – green or not
These arguments are all the same. They take the current rate of growth, plug in a time period longer than has elapsed since the death of vitalism as a theory of life (an idea which, today, is laughable to consider), and conclude that we need to stop growing immediately.
Obviously we have to stop growing at some point. The Sun produces a finite amount of power [1], the density of the Universe is very low, etc.
Why now? The eco-pessimists never answer this question, and that is because right now is the wrong time to stop growing. This article does not attempt to address it at all, but flings a few symbols around to put on the air of rigor. Bonus points for somehow managing to use the word "decolonise". At the current rate of growth, the right time would probably be in about 150 years. But the rate of growth has actually been slowing down over the last century, and will likely continue to gradually slow, as scientific discoveries continue to become more difficult. Taking that into account, the end of growth is probably half a millenium out, supposing a huge war or other disaster doesn't set us back.
I suspect the real reason people want to advocate for the end of growth now is because everyone wants to be a revolutionary; everyone wants to make the kind of great, world-shaking advancement that Einstein or Fleming or Borlaug did. To admit that while we probably have to stop growing, it won't be for a long time — that would be sort of dull. You can't sell books about it.
1: Energy per unit time.
No, we won't. You have no evidence for this and nobody who studies the problem believes it. Furthermore, climate change doesn't work that way: the 50-year outlook is largely "baked in", and reforms made now are trying to change the 100-200-year outlook.
I'm a physicist. I have friends who actually study climate science, as in, it's their job. I have spend my entire adult life paying attention to the problem. Nobody believes the kind of things you're claiming. There's a simple graph here:
https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/
It shows that if GHG emissions drop by 2/3 in ten years and disappear in 50, we get a +1.3 C difference in 80 years (2100), whereas "current policies" is a +2.9 C change. When you reduce that to 50 years, it gets narrower; climate change is doubly cumulative (CO2 accumulates, which drives the accumulation of heat). But in practice, we expect to reduce emissions while continuing to grow the economy, thanks to renewables. The actual 50-year difference between shutting off the economy and just building some goddamn solar panels is probably less than half a degree.
I'm not here to "be convinced" by you. I'm here to, hopefully, convince you to stop derailing the debate and making my side look silly. Climate change is a problem. It is a problem that needs to be taken seriously. It is not the end of human development.
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.
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.
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/
As far as dire scenarios are concerned, I struggle with them as usually the realities play out differently. Arguably in part because people do consider such scenarios.
Seems to me it is often portrayed that way by opponents strawmanning it or by media simply very lossily compressing it into a few sentences/seconds chunks. But I'm not sure how many of the proponents really have that view. Even in cases where degrowth writers have "simple life forever!" type phrasings my impression is that that's not really the focus of their work and they're not really strongly wedded to such a vision for the long term. Their core focus is the imminent (as in 100 years) negative externalities, not the long future after that.
I think Jason Hickel is an interesting case. I've learned a lot from reading both his work and that of his critics. His "What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification" is a good intro to his thinking[0]. I think very little there is really incompatible with expansion into space in the longer term.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1...
This is precisely where we were when people first started raising alarm bells about greenhouse gases.
The thermal emissivity of the night side of earth is only one of many limits we are running head first into. Almost all scarce resources, many abundant ones, and even abstract concepts like the growth of classical computation are all hitting limits where they only scale linearly or worse with energy input.
Growing into the solar system is largely irrelevant because it's a constant increase vs an exponential and will not be meaningfully coupled to earth's economy without energy expendature on earth proportional to trade volume. And there's no compelling reason to hinge everything on the assumption that the second law of thermodynamics and speed of light are both false so nothing outside the solar system is relevant to those living inside it unless we overturn one or both first.
All of this to avoid reexamining the blind faith assumption that we have to give an exponentially growing share of the pie to those who have the biggest share. Growth is only necessary for survival of the 99.99% if every year they give 2% of their wealth to the 0.01%
Edit: "materially" in the sense of stuff. Some data from a nearby star could still be highly valuable, but exchanging stuff over lightyears might rarely be efficient.
You ask why now? The answer is because we've already overshot the ability to do everything we do sustainably with the resources available. We need to get off the treadmill now and hope like hell technology and the available buffers are enough to limit the harm to 'merely' hundreds of millions dying.
Also, for example, innovation from growing economies elsewhere can reach back to earth. Expensive stuff that relies on growth can continue to happen and the results shared.
Carrying capacity of the solar system is huge, so quite some growth to be captured there. Once it is exhausted, growth for earth and the solar system might slow down because information will have significant travel time. And we haven't even exhausted earth and earth will become uninhabitable ultimately anyway so terminal sustainability is not truly needed.
This entails growth in most primary industries also ending, as well as a large reduction in many.
This is incompatible with a system where people starve and everything breaks whenever growth goes below 2%.
"Stop giving everything to the people who already have stuff so we need the pie to grow at an exponential rate just to keep the share that goes to 99.99% of the world constant" isn't a hard concept.
GHG is bad because it produces single digit watts of forcing (captured solar heat that would otherwise escape).
Direct thermal forcing from either capturing sunlight (making the surface darker) or emitting heat from nuclear derived (or in short term, fossil fuels before they run out) sources is just as catastrophic, but further off.
We can happily replace our current energy needs with nuclear and renewable, but we're just back at square one if we don't end growth.
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.
If you admit that a carbon tax would make us both richer and greener, then you're welcome to argue that on top of that we could do more.
If you can't admit that clearly, then it's just more climate denial: oh it's too expensive to fix, we have to keep giving money to Russia, because insulation and heat pumps are a hoax.
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.
Even the degrowth in japan is subsidized with growth in other regions. Real degrowth is instability, is human nature going feral back to religous roots, make many copies, fight the outsiders unbelievers, recover make many copies.
Cycling this drain, decomplexifies societies, loosing the ability to supply bureaucracy, research and experiments.
Lots of countries worldwide partially circle or circled in this loop.
One can not fix a situation, one does not talk and observe objectively. This includes disabilitys of the species as a system constraint.