> European Union members have signed off on a report that warns focusing on unchecked economic growth is contributing to the destruction of global biodiversity
It would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth.
Maybe they know about Malthus saying the same thing and being proven wrong?
We have had millennia of exponential growth. Slower in the past, and positive over the long term for a long time (since the bronze age collapse at a global level?).
Technological advance allows growth that is far higher than increases in resource usage. We often do the same thing on far lower resources than it used to take - sometimes far better.
Also, it’s not an MBA/capitalism thing. Every socialist leader throughout history promised more growth, they just thought it should be more equitable. Ever heard of Five Year Plans? They’re still going on in places around the world.
Having a goal for growth is a global phenomenon across all economic systems. If you feel like this is a problem, then it’s much larger than any one job type or even any one economic system.
Not a single year has our population dropped.
We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
When that too stops so does the music as a baffling amount of the economy and society and it's support systems is predicated on endless inflationary growth. Frankly nobody in this game of musical chairs will fix it till it hits.
This ignores innovation, which drastically reduces externalities over time (as it has historically; see smog and pollution from England Industrial revolution). Granted that can benefit or even require investment from the State to expedite things. R&D spending was better in the 20th century. At any rate you cannot divorce said innovation from growth and consumption.
By contrast, "degrowth" would inflict harm and make it impossible for developing countries to improve their quality of life. People aren't immigrating to the U.S. for the healthcare. We can easily qualify why it represents a "better life": houses, vehicles, abundance of food, goods and conveniences, public infrastructure and services, etc.
Global population growth rate for it's part is poised to stagnate. There's no question of "infinite growth", nor is it relied upon.
Folks, "Limits to Growth" was published _over fifty years ago_ (https://www.clubofrome.org/ltg50/) and revisited repeatedly since, each time in so doing effectively confirming their worst-case hypotheses.
But we've been able to take a highly systems thinking-inflected, as quantitative as possible approach to looking over how human's current perspective of what "growth" means and applying it over time to the resources of the planet we live on, and conclude with decent confidence and error bars that it's not just unsustainable, but that we're past the point of overconsumption and will have a very uncomfortable "correction", and we've been able to indicate that for decades.
Looking at this somewhat critically, did the predictions not turn out to be completely incorrect?
Specifically the industrial output and food per person, as well as the "available ressources" curve.
In my view, this should have been expected from the very start. Every single fixed-reserve + extrapolated usage rate calculation that we ever did produced incorrect predictions from what I know (and I'm not even really exaggerating here); this happens because increasing scarcity provides a lot of backpressure against both assumptions.
Just consider e.g. fracking or oil sands for the "fixed reserves" of something like gas (from a 1970 perspective), and things like aluminium conductors for the "extrapolated use rate" for something like copper.
I'm not saying that the whole concept is wrong. Long term exponential growth is obviously going to run into a wall basically by definition.
But I think for humanity right now, current population trends (i.e. negative growth everywhere) is all we need to keep ressource usage physically possible for the next centuries at least (and probably going to cause negative economic growth simply from population decrease).
I don't have any deep background in econ, but do we not need to switch from talking about GDP to talking about a version of Net Domestic Product where "net" includes:
- changes to the value of natural and ecosystem resources (e.g. if I clear a forest to sell timber, we must acknowledge some lost value for the forest)
- amount of economic transactions in service of mitigating problems created by externalities from other activity (e.g. if my pollution gets into your groundwater, you paying to remediate the pollution isn't "value created")
I.e. growth of _actual net value_ still sounds like a good thing to pursue but we let our politicians run around doing anything to maximize GDP without talking about what the "gross" is hiding.
It's kind of an accounting problem. What you really want is human happiness and abundant nature but doing some gardening and playing with the kids may produce happiness but no GDP whereas enlarging a chemicals plant to make even larger SUVs gives much GDP.
Trouble is it's hard to account for that kind of stuff but maybe we could make a flawed but functional accounting thing with AI?
Is this a joke? Growth is caused by consumer demand, and answering to it in the best way possible. It's not an 'obsession' of the capitalist businesses or countries. Capitalism is simply an algorithm which tries to allocate resources such that a growing demand can be answered, and that everyone has their needs satisfied.
There are plenty of people who don't have enough food, enough housing, or other basic needs. The only way to solve this is growth. People in developing countries upgrading their lifestyle to modern standards is a huge source of growth. Are you saying that all these people should stop their obsession with growth?
Edit:
I've got to add that it's true that economic policies of countries are 'obsessed' with GDP growth. It's a problem of central planning, not markets.
Inflationary monetary policies are specifically designed to accelerate consumption, and as a consequence a lot of economic activity is allocated serving this fake demand, resulting in cancerous growth, i.e. consumption for the sake of consumption, while in real terms people are poorer than before.
Businesses need, or at the very least strongly want, to increase profits. There’s not like there’s any end to that supposed algorithm. And it gets harder and harder as time goes on.
And as usual the cart is put before the horse. Businesses just don’t answer to consumer demand. They very strongly set the terms for it. And if consumer demands go down? That’s what the marketing industry is for. To create new demands.
Some Hank Hill person isn’t the one who designed e.g. America to be car dependent. The car lobby did. But typically Hank Hill gets blamed when he chooses to live two hours from his workplace because home prices are too high, taking the bus takes twice as long and train does not exist so he uses a car to commute, and he consumes beer in his freetime to unwind from the job he chooses to work at, and he isn’t great at recycling. (This might have deviated a little from the real-life Hank Hill.)
My old cynic, grumpy mind can't see this as anything but virtue signaling. I would be overjoyed to be wrong.
One corner stone of the EU is the 4 freedoms[0] that among other things denies public institutions the ability to look at anything besides the monetary cost when deciding who to contract for anything.
And as JIT[1] no longer only applies to goods but also to people noone has people working for them anymore, but contract everything out.
Obviously I haven't read the report/document so maybe there are some political steps that the signees are binding themselves to take towards a non-growth-at-all-cost system but I really doubt it.
I think the main quote from the article is important but the headline misses the point:
>> Markets are failing to adequately price or value biodiversity, such as filtration of pollutants, climate regulation and pollination.
It doesn't seem immediately obvious to me that growth rate of GDP is a direct proxy for this fact. How is GDP growth rate is a consequence of this or vice versa, rather than a second or third order effect?
I think plenty of people agree that an open and fair market also tries to price in externalities, especially ones that could end all life on the planet.
When I was a child, I was spending my summers at my grandparents.
They had a cozy house in the village.
They worked the land, they had a few animals.
They grew their food.
They sold some wine and fruit at the market.
They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy.
They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc.
Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street.
Now compare with life in a big modern city.
I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves.
Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people.
Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time.
Smiles for money only.
I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.
This is a completely nostalgic, one-sided view of the urban vs. rural divide. It's also ignorant of the data on the impact of cities on nature.
Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off.
People live in cities because they are vibrant, they have culture, the arts, intellectuals, innovation, etc. Yes there are areas with high traffic and noise, but there are also quiet neighborhoods where everyone walks everywhere, you can pop into a bar or a cafe on every corner, eat 20 different types of cuisine, go to a book store, go see a show on any night of the week.
Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.
Depending on how old you are, I might suggest that you were simply not aware of the details of your grandparents' lives at that time. And it just sounds like you have surrounded yourself with assholes in adulthood.
We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality.
It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.
Your problem is that you were happy as a child and unhappy as an adult. That's a personal problem, and has little to do with rural or urban living. As other commenters have pointed out, you can most likely afford to buy a farm if you really want that lifestyle. I suspect you don't, because it sucks major ass to have to do manual labor all day, to eat almost entirely the same things and see the same people for decades on end, and to choke off your access to most of the joy and beauty in the world.
The only justification would be that we are in some liminal space and are living in the confusing period leading up to some tech utopia.
You also can still live in the way your grandparents did. In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city. We are just terrified of uncertainty nowadays. Maybe all the technology and distractions keep us from hitting that tipping point of despair/discomfort that would drive us to take risky actions.
Living in a big city is usually better for the environment than living in a rural area. City-dwellers live in smaller spaces closer together, so they consume fewer resources and emit less carbon.
You’re right. Ignore the other comments not recognizing that happiness and health can be had without a constant competition with everyone else. The modern way of life is broken. The old way of lives in many older civilizations are better. We need to stop glorifying our western order and look east.
The answer is that most people did not live like what you remember.
For most of the last many thousands of years most people worked very hard for very little and died young of disease and war. If you got injured or sick there was no real health care. Women had a high chance of dying in childbirth. Your kids had a high chance of dying before 10.
That stressful city life is better than how most people in history have lived.
Of course we could make it quite a bit better still. We are nowhere near an optimum. A lot of our wounds are self inflicted: addiction to constant doom scrolling, hedonic treadmill for bling, real estate hyperinflation because we refuse to build enough housing.
But that description of the past is very sugar coated and selective.
I would argue that actually political corruption is destroying nature because there would not be an obsession with growth if executives did not have so much leverage to make workers desperate for jobs because they're so underpaid.
If we can't answer that question then we can't really judge our actions effectively. If we view humanity as the most intelligent life form not just on the planet, but in the entire universe, then we are the only source of order in an infinite chaos. All of reality is just entropy and mindless cruelty except for humanity.
Viewed in that lens we almost have a duty to expand before some cosmic event obliterates us. Granted we are expanding in a moronic way and our goal seems to be to make plastic trash for people to mindlessly run through, but still, It would be nice if politicians occasionally stepped back from the narrow view and thought about what was at stake.
I do not know how policymakers should act on that if poor people want to consume like the rich ones and rich people do not want to give up even an inch of their wealth.
Degrowthism is one of the dominant ideologies of our time. I think it's wrong: economic growth is good, it has made our lives much better, and we should continue to prioritize it.
One important detail about % growth is that it compounds. So small differences in growth today can make a huge difference 50 years from now.
The world I want to live in is one that prioritizes protecting the environment but also aggressively pursues new technology and growth. Our descendants will thank us.
This ship has sailed. The environment is destined to be destroyed sooner or later. It's just not at this generation so hardly anybody in charge is worried. Except the growth problem that cannot be solved, inequality is another fact. Sure I pollute with my yearly 10MWh of home heating + 10 for my car, but someone pollutes in multiple times that with his yacht and jet. Let's start by converting him before we all revert back to middle ages.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] threadIt would be good to know which members of the EU are currently experiencing unchecked economic growth.
We have had millennia of exponential growth. Slower in the past, and positive over the long term for a long time (since the bronze age collapse at a global level?).
Technological advance allows growth that is far higher than increases in resource usage. We often do the same thing on far lower resources than it used to take - sometimes far better.
That doesn’t mean it will happen.
Lots of companies fail or shrink.
Also, it’s not an MBA/capitalism thing. Every socialist leader throughout history promised more growth, they just thought it should be more equitable. Ever heard of Five Year Plans? They’re still going on in places around the world.
Having a goal for growth is a global phenomenon across all economic systems. If you feel like this is a problem, then it’s much larger than any one job type or even any one economic system.
good luck to all of you.
Not a single year has our population dropped. We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
When that too stops so does the music as a baffling amount of the economy and society and it's support systems is predicated on endless inflationary growth. Frankly nobody in this game of musical chairs will fix it till it hits.
By contrast, "degrowth" would inflict harm and make it impossible for developing countries to improve their quality of life. People aren't immigrating to the U.S. for the healthcare. We can easily qualify why it represents a "better life": houses, vehicles, abundance of food, goods and conveniences, public infrastructure and services, etc.
Global population growth rate for it's part is poised to stagnate. There's no question of "infinite growth", nor is it relied upon.
Yes, their website is...unconvincing. Which is poetic in its own way. Wikipedia's take on the original report at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is probably a better read.
But we've been able to take a highly systems thinking-inflected, as quantitative as possible approach to looking over how human's current perspective of what "growth" means and applying it over time to the resources of the planet we live on, and conclude with decent confidence and error bars that it's not just unsustainable, but that we're past the point of overconsumption and will have a very uncomfortable "correction", and we've been able to indicate that for decades.
Specifically the industrial output and food per person, as well as the "available ressources" curve.
In my view, this should have been expected from the very start. Every single fixed-reserve + extrapolated usage rate calculation that we ever did produced incorrect predictions from what I know (and I'm not even really exaggerating here); this happens because increasing scarcity provides a lot of backpressure against both assumptions.
Just consider e.g. fracking or oil sands for the "fixed reserves" of something like gas (from a 1970 perspective), and things like aluminium conductors for the "extrapolated use rate" for something like copper.
I'm not saying that the whole concept is wrong. Long term exponential growth is obviously going to run into a wall basically by definition.
But I think for humanity right now, current population trends (i.e. negative growth everywhere) is all we need to keep ressource usage physically possible for the next centuries at least (and probably going to cause negative economic growth simply from population decrease).
- changes to the value of natural and ecosystem resources (e.g. if I clear a forest to sell timber, we must acknowledge some lost value for the forest)
- amount of economic transactions in service of mitigating problems created by externalities from other activity (e.g. if my pollution gets into your groundwater, you paying to remediate the pollution isn't "value created")
I.e. growth of _actual net value_ still sounds like a good thing to pursue but we let our politicians run around doing anything to maximize GDP without talking about what the "gross" is hiding.
In better times, perhaps we have the collective will to try.
Trouble is it's hard to account for that kind of stuff but maybe we could make a flawed but functional accounting thing with AI?
There are plenty of people who don't have enough food, enough housing, or other basic needs. The only way to solve this is growth. People in developing countries upgrading their lifestyle to modern standards is a huge source of growth. Are you saying that all these people should stop their obsession with growth?
Edit:
I've got to add that it's true that economic policies of countries are 'obsessed' with GDP growth. It's a problem of central planning, not markets.
Inflationary monetary policies are specifically designed to accelerate consumption, and as a consequence a lot of economic activity is allocated serving this fake demand, resulting in cancerous growth, i.e. consumption for the sake of consumption, while in real terms people are poorer than before.
And as usual the cart is put before the horse. Businesses just don’t answer to consumer demand. They very strongly set the terms for it. And if consumer demands go down? That’s what the marketing industry is for. To create new demands.
Some Hank Hill person isn’t the one who designed e.g. America to be car dependent. The car lobby did. But typically Hank Hill gets blamed when he chooses to live two hours from his workplace because home prices are too high, taking the bus takes twice as long and train does not exist so he uses a car to commute, and he consumes beer in his freetime to unwind from the job he chooses to work at, and he isn’t great at recycling. (This might have deviated a little from the real-life Hank Hill.)
My old cynic, grumpy mind can't see this as anything but virtue signaling. I would be overjoyed to be wrong.
One corner stone of the EU is the 4 freedoms[0] that among other things denies public institutions the ability to look at anything besides the monetary cost when deciding who to contract for anything.
And as JIT[1] no longer only applies to goods but also to people noone has people working for them anymore, but contract everything out.
Obviously I haven't read the report/document so maybe there are some political steps that the signees are binding themselves to take towards a non-growth-at-all-cost system but I really doubt it.
-----
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing
>> Markets are failing to adequately price or value biodiversity, such as filtration of pollutants, climate regulation and pollination.
It doesn't seem immediately obvious to me that growth rate of GDP is a direct proxy for this fact. How is GDP growth rate is a consequence of this or vice versa, rather than a second or third order effect?
I think plenty of people agree that an open and fair market also tries to price in externalities, especially ones that could end all life on the planet.
They had a big house, land, clean air, clean water and they were healthy. They celebrated the holidays, had many friends, went to church, weddings, funerals, etc. Villagers always greeted them and stopped for a quick chat when they met on the street.
Now compare with life in a big modern city.
I design complicated distributed systems using AI in order to provide shelter and food for myself. Those are tools which other people use to achieve their goal of providing shelter and food for themselves.
Tons of cars, the air is polluted, constant noise, fake bling, restaurants selling food at 20x price, stressed, depressed, lonely people. Each in their own digital rabbit hole on their phones all the time. Smiles for money only.
I'm really struggling to understand what we've grown into and why this rat race is considered 'better' than what people have had for millennia without destroying nature in the process.
Cities have a lower carbon footprint per capita, lower land use per capita, people own fewer cars, use public transportation more often. If everyone lived in a city, nature would be better off.
People live in cities because they are vibrant, they have culture, the arts, intellectuals, innovation, etc. Yes there are areas with high traffic and noise, but there are also quiet neighborhoods where everyone walks everywhere, you can pop into a bar or a cafe on every corner, eat 20 different types of cuisine, go to a book store, go see a show on any night of the week.
Your picture of the friendly villagers might be true in your experience, but in reality a lot of those people are nasty when they encounter any kind of cultural diversity or difference.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
We work less than our counterparts 150 years ago:
https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
Air pollution has decreased over the past few decades (probably much further, just don't have data).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutan...
We're obviously richer, too. Your grandparents had a cozy house - did they have good fresh food all winter when growing up? Could they keep food from going bad in the summer? What about indoor plumbing? These things are so ubiquitous now it's hard to even remember that they aren't just part of the basic fabric of reality.
It's easy to look back with nostalgia (and literal survivor bias - "my ancestors all survived") at the past. But if you actually look at history you will see that "what people have had for millenia" was ... pretty awful. It's an AMAZING time to be alive.
You also can still live in the way your grandparents did. In the rural USA 10+ acres is going to cost less than a condo in the city. We are just terrified of uncertainty nowadays. Maybe all the technology and distractions keep us from hitting that tipping point of despair/discomfort that would drive us to take risky actions.
A population of eight billion, at least three of which live in industrialized regions.
My currently 99yo grandpa was born when there were approximately two billion people. He spent a huge chunk of his childhood running around barefoot.
Whenever he talks about that time I can't help but think this world doesn't exist any more and hasn't for a long time now.
Moreover, I also encounter the same problems in the big city where I work and live.
Hard to be optimistic.
For most of the last many thousands of years most people worked very hard for very little and died young of disease and war. If you got injured or sick there was no real health care. Women had a high chance of dying in childbirth. Your kids had a high chance of dying before 10.
That stressful city life is better than how most people in history have lived.
Of course we could make it quite a bit better still. We are nowhere near an optimum. A lot of our wounds are self inflicted: addiction to constant doom scrolling, hedonic treadmill for bling, real estate hyperinflation because we refuse to build enough housing.
But that description of the past is very sugar coated and selective.
If we can't answer that question then we can't really judge our actions effectively. If we view humanity as the most intelligent life form not just on the planet, but in the entire universe, then we are the only source of order in an infinite chaos. All of reality is just entropy and mindless cruelty except for humanity.
Viewed in that lens we almost have a duty to expand before some cosmic event obliterates us. Granted we are expanding in a moronic way and our goal seems to be to make plastic trash for people to mindlessly run through, but still, It would be nice if politicians occasionally stepped back from the narrow view and thought about what was at stake.
One solution to our social maladies is a kind totalitarian dictator with total surveillance.
One important detail about % growth is that it compounds. So small differences in growth today can make a huge difference 50 years from now.
The world I want to live in is one that prioritizes protecting the environment but also aggressively pursues new technology and growth. Our descendants will thank us.