
Degrowth - wslh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
======
Zarkonnen
One of the things this comes down to is whether our measures of wealth are
sensible.

A country hot enough to require air conditioning will have an increased GDP,
but this GDP is really just for bringing it to the norm of another country
that doesn't require aircon. And should we count the extra economic activity
generated from creating a new demand where there previously was none? [1]

If we optimise for the wrong thing, we end up with bad outcomes.

[1]
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-18/convincing-w...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-18/convincing-
women-in-china-theyre-too-hairy#r=read)

~~~
aes256
I really dislike GDP as a measure, for this and other reasons.

Ultimately, GDP isn't what matters. We should care about wealth creation,
about efficient use of resources (including labor), about happiness and
enjoyment.

An inevitable consequence of abandoning GDP as a measure of economic progress
(as we will, inevitably do) will be coming to terms with the fact that rampant
consumerism and gross inefficiencies do not constitute 'growth'

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jacques_chester
Nothing stops you from doing this yourself.

Just don't expect the rest of us to appreciate being forced to do it.

~~~
dscrd
We now theorize that on Easter Island, the societies that presided there
destroyed their island's environment to such an extent that they themselves
were essentially destroyed.

To prevent that from happening, it would have made no impact if a few
individuals would have stopped the harmful actions. They would have had to
change the whole culture of consumption, production, even religion. See where
I'm going with this?

~~~
mseebach
> See where I'm going with this?

Yes, you're constructing a "the end justifies the means" argument.

~~~
zurn
Lobbying for some change that's necessary to avoid a global scale catastrophe
implies "the end justifies the means", thus should be rejected?

~~~
smsm42
Depends on the nature of "something" and the value of "necessary". If somebody
argued that to avoid global overpopulation and Malthusian catastrophe, we are
to kill every 10th child born - you would probably reject this, even though
the argument would be "it is necessary to avoid a global scale catastrophe".

So far all Malthusian predictions of global scale exhaustion reliably turned
false and in most cases, laughably so, in hindsight. This teaches us that such
claims should be taken with extreme skepticism and drastic measures proposed
under these claims are most probably not justified.

This, of course, does not contradict the usability of technology (or non-
technology means) for greater efficiency of energy use, conservation, etc.
There's nothing wrong with recycling, reuse and energy saving. It just doesn't
need to be turned to extremes under the slogans of future catastrophe that
would never happen.

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wavesounds
I think its interesting how productivity increases have led to increased
consumption instead of increased free time. Maybe this is partially because
consumption is viewed as nobel in the sense that it's what causes the economy
to grow.

Does anyone have any thoughts on a technology tax? If say you're fired because
your boss hired a robot to do your job, your boss pays a percentage of his
increase in profits as a tax which is redistributed to everyone - much like in
Alaska how everyone gets a check for the oil that is pulled from the ground,
what if everyone got a check for the technology pulled from our minds? Maybe
this would encourage people to value technological growth over consumption
growth.

~~~
mseebach
> If say you're fired because your boss hired a robot to do your job,

You're not seeing the whole picture: Being replaced by a robot is just the
final step in an extremely long sequence of productivity enhancements that
being with using a shovel instead of your bare hands. Why should the tax hit
robots but not a power drill? Or a fork-lift truck? A washing machine? Or a
computer? (don't forget, as programmers, we are parties to one of the largest
eradications of jobs in the history of mankind)

What you're really proposing is a tax on increasing efficiency, by a long shot
the best and most easily understood kind of growth. Interestingly, with
reference to the movement's goals, little frees up more resources for family,
art and music than getting the same work done in half the time.

~~~
aes256
> What you're really proposing is a tax on increasing efficiency, by a long
> shot the best and most easily understood kind of growth. Interestingly, with
> reference to the movement's goals, little frees up more resources for
> family, art and music than getting the same work done in half the time.

I think the real gripe with this is that, although automated production may be
more efficient, it fosters greater wealth inequality.

As tools become more powerful, and come to replace rather than assist humans,
those with existing wealth become yet more powerful. The evil factory owner
can now produce their widgets five times faster, at half the cost, and they
don't have an unruly workforce to rely on.

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rizumu
It is worth repeating the main idea here: "Key to the concept of degrowth is
that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring and a decrease
in well-being. Rather, 'degrowthists' aim to maximize happiness and well-being
through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting
more time to art, music, family, culture and community."

~~~
tomjen3
That sounds like something people might say about socialism too.

We need only look at the Soviet Union to see how that turned out.

~~~
arethuza
That really doesn't sound like the Soviet Union at all - which was obsessed
with growth through centrally controlled 5 year plans.

One of the many reasons the Soviets failed is that they channeled a huge
proportion of their national wealth into their military (fearing as they did
an attach from NATO) and away from improving the living standards of their
citizens.

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anovikov
This is impossible because it will stop the investment loop: investment cannot
exist in the economy which is contracting and is supposed to contract
indefinitely, because average return on investment will be negative. This is
why such conditions will never happen.

As for environmental concerns, huge successes by the Germans seems to prove
that transition to renewable energy is possible, even with current or slightly
better level of technology. This may take some 30-40 years for most developed
countries, and about as much after that for the rest, but we seem to have that
time given successes in development of shale gas, coalbed methane, and most
recently, shale oil.

Germans are good example because if they are outliers given the conditions
they have, they are outliers in negative sense: they don't have much of either
renewable or non-renewable resources, they are rich and need to consume a lot
of the both, and cannot afford having energy too pricey because their economy
is based on industrial exports so they need to stay competitive. If they can
do it, everyone can do it. Others mostly don't care so far, soon they will
have to.

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31reasons
I find this fascinating as I am thinking more about how companies acting as
Tumors. Growth for the sake of growth is the symptom of cancer. Larger
economies do enable human collaborative feats like going to the moon and
finding ways to live healthy and longer lives but it's engine itself driven by
the fuel (mass consumption) of greed and desire rather than curiosity and joy.
All signals seems to indicate that it has gone too far. We have to come up
with a sustainable way to create large economies.

~~~
jacques_chester
The difference is that tumours don't have to solve economic calculation
problems: companies do. As they reach the limits of that capability they
become increasingly inefficient until they are supplanted by smaller, nimbler
competitors.

... or propped up by governments. But then the analogy is even more broken.

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thibaut_barrere
After jacques_chester comment, I wonder (for everyone): what is you country,
and is degrowth seen as something positive or negative in general in your
country?

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mseebach
In Denmark and the UK, the narrative is appealing, not because of its merits
but because it provides an alternative to austerity. It seems to be mostly
utilized by the same hard-left that has always been more concerned with
distributing wealth than creating it. In both countries, the main-stream left
has long since realized that there is no alternative to reducing the deficit
and bringing back growth.

~~~
aes256
> In both countries, the main-stream left has long since realized that there
> is no alternative to reducing the deficit and bringing back growth.

Although behind the scenes this may be the case, the rhetoric remains.

In the UK we still have Labour bleating about the Conservative-Liberal
Democrat coalition making spending cuts "too hard, too fast" when they are
barely making a dent in the annual deficit.

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sgdesign
Maybe it's not so much growth vs degrowth as short-term vs long-term? A
country like China that's pursuing a very aggressive short-term growth policy
is obviously endangering some aspects of their future with pollution,
corruption, etc.

I don't have a problem with pursuing growth, so much as focusing on the next
few years (or the next election) to the exclusion of anything else.

~~~
jacques_chester
Is long term growth qualitatively different from the integral of short term
growth over the same period?

~~~
smanek
I think so.

On a several decades/century scale it's worthwhile to funnel at least a few
percent of GDP into basic science research[1]. But, in any given quarter/year,
it's almost certainly a net loss. The trick being that every few decades,
you'll get nuclear power, the transistor, etc[2].

Or, as a 'local' example: non-trivial number theory had basically no benefit
for centuries but humanity kept 'investing' resources into it - which a short
term optimizer wouldn't. Then, cryptography came along and it suddenly 'paid'
for the entire field a dozen times over.

[1]: Research is sort of like early stage VC - but with funds that pay out
over 70 years instead of ~7.

[2]: I would love to write about _many_ more examples in much more depth, but
will omit for the sake of brevity. I roughly feel like the newtonian mechanics
was directly responsible for the industrial revolution, relativistic physics
for the nuclear age, quantum mechanics for the computer age (with similar
analogues in the biological sciences).

~~~
jacques_chester
The example Carl Sagan gives is Maxwell's equations. They seemed pretty
abstract at the time, but well ... Radio. Television. Fibre optics. Satellite
communications.

That said -- these didn't happen all at once. And every technological
upheaval, no matter how large it has been _in itself_ , has still appeared in
the larger context to be only an incremental improvement.

------
jonathanleane
Serious question:

How does a country that embraces 'degrowth' defend itself militarily from a
country that is still working on the high production paradigm?

~~~
danieldrehmer
The same way France has always defended itself.

~~~
jonathanleane
Not sure if you're being funny?

France has one of the highest rates of productivity per capita [0] and is the
5th highest military spender in the world [1].

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_hour_worked)
[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures)

~~~
calpaterson
I think it's a joke based on the fact that was a relatively rich county in the
20th Century and had a poor record on self-defence. France was actually
considered to have the strongest military in Europe in the late 1930's, but it
didn't pan out for them (bad management).

------
marshallp
The fastest way to degrowth is creation of brain-computer interfaces that have
realistic feel like in the matrix. Degrowthers should join the hacker movement
in advancing that technology. The way to most quickly advance that technology
is through computer vision technologies that allow the running of biotech
experiments at an industrial scale. The key to computer vision is the
application of machine learning (neural nets and random forests). The key to
that is the creation of classifiers on image datasets on cloud computing
infrastructure. Therefore, projects like microsoft kinect and google goggles
in addition to vision guided industrial robots are the best degrowther
strategies.

~~~
arsey
The fastest way to degrowth is [growth] ??

~~~
marshallp
Focused growth. Instead of factories churning out designer handbags and pet
food, have them churn out biotech experiments for brain-computer interfaces.

