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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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".
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.
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:
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.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] mitchbob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AstralStorm|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] roflyear|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elgenie|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coldtea|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] plankers|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fulafel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] impossiblefork|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pessimizer|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] imtringued|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
"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")
[+] [-] mulmen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dariosalvi78|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worik|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RandomLensman|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sprucevoid|3 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] Schroedingersat|3 years ago|reply
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%
[+] [-] RalfWausE|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sega_sai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brutusborn|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nly|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jokoon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mjfl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nico|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|3 years ago|reply
"society" could, on the other hand, decide to impose taxes on individuals that consume more than their fair share.
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dariosalvi78|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anm89|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] refurb|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dariosalvi78|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] winReInstall|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Manuel_D|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcjiggerlog|3 years ago|reply
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.