You can ridicule the specifics, but the high-level idea here is spot on. Either you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources, or you have to find a way to have a stable society without economic growth. I see no reason to think the former is possible, so that leaves the latter. The alternative is some kind of calamity.
> you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources
Hasn't technology generally been heading in this direction? It seems we are constantly doing more with less. If it keeps up, and we slowdown procreation, I see no reason why it won't drive resource usage down long term.
I mean, I completely disagree with the premise that we must consume non-renewable resources to generate wealth, but assuming it is true I think we've come a long way in changing that and the future looks even better.
> Hasn't technology generally been heading in this direction? It seems we are constantly doing more with less
Actually no, we haven't and we don't. Carbon emissions are still growing.
Classic mistake: You're confusing relative and absolute reductions. We have reduced relative ecological impact a lot, but overall impact has been growing along the way.
One way technology can really decrease consumption is by turning humans to machines. If you are essentially a CPU, your energy consumption would likely be very low yet your computational power and lifespan could be much higher. This way earth could support a much higher quantity of "humans", being mostly electric, it could even leave the confinements of earth, this way freeing earth.
The only challenge left is to maintain cognitive growth drives when you're based on electricity, rather than hormones among other chemicals.
You can only increase efficiency so far. I do agree that a reduction in population would result in lower resource usage, but that's an economic slowdown, i.e. the opposite of growth.
> the high-level idea here is spot on. Either you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources, or you have to find a way to have a stable society without economic growth
That's just a narrow-minded false dilemma. There's a (for all practical purposes) infinite universe out there, we have plenty of resources to grow even if we stop recycling.
Aside from the practicality of expanding fast enough (Dyson sphere around the sun in about 1400 years, needing to leave the galaxy in 2400 years), how far can you feasibly bring resources back to earth from to fuel that growth here? If you can't do that at some point, you have to stop growing locally even if the species is expanding. And besides, without FTL travel we're not going to be colonizing anything, just spreading seeds of new societies and, eventually, species that happen to be our offspring.
The economic value of a healthy environment is certainly not accounted for, but growth isn't bad. Externalities and tragedy of the commons are.
I want the economy to grow. Specifically I want the wind and solar industries to grow REALLY fast. So much so that their lobbying power is greater than that of the oil industry.
>So much so that their lobbying power is greater than that of the oil industry.
I've noticed a bit of this from the anti-renewables crowd. They accuse green energy proponents of just wanting to increase the value of their investments. Somehow they ignore the huge investment in fossil fuels though.
For a while, I was pretty sold on anarcho-primitivism as a concept (Derrick Jensen is a prominent figure in that sphere), but it is pretty deluded to think that quality of life would increase and life would be cushy and comfortable.
What improvements in quality of life do we really _need_ though?
In first world countries we're so comfy and everything is so convenient that the leading causes of death are due to eating too much and not moving enough. That's pretty ironic if you ask me.
We don't have to go back to living in caves and eating raw animals of course. But I don't see how slowing down would decrease our quality of life.
There is no limit in artificial quality of life improvement. You can spend 1 month of your salary on a bread toaster or on a few iot light bulbs... Or you can send it to a private pension and retire x months earlier than the legal age.
And then the people whose SoL is terrible right now would outcompete you and your SoL will fall, because they're the better candidate for the job. There are a lot of people whose standard of living is low right now.
We couldn't even scratch the planet with an all-out nuclear war, why do people always resort to such ridiculous hyperbole? The planet will be fine, we just might destroy our species (very unlikely with pollution etc.).
An author once came and spoke to my environmental studies class. Of the Club of Rome, he said "Fascinating ideas. They might be right. But try getting elected by promising a shrinking economy."
Yeah, not gonna happen. Best to treat growth as a given and work around it, imho.
It could work if the promise was to give people time instead of a 9 to 5 shitty job, and assuring equality through a Universal Basic Income. That income could be financed with taxes on externalities. Taxing externalities would also benefit the local and more sustainable economy with more decent jobs.
Maybe this would work in the future, but probably not in our lifetime. Paying $12k a year to every American would already cost about as much (more?) as the US collects in taxes.
Because a UBI is cash, the accounting is a little weird. If you pay $10k "more" in taxes but then receive a $12k UBI, has this cost you money?
Outside of some nominal administrative cost in cutting the checks it doesn't "cost" anything on net, it just moves money around. Of course, the above-median person paying $14k in taxes but only receiving $12k back has lost $2k on a personal level, and that's really the cost to be calculated -- the reduction in incentive caused by the tax.
But if you use the model where the UBI replaces existing social assistance programs, marginal tax rates wouldn't be that different than they are now, and the marginal rates on lower income people would be lower when you account for the marginal losses they currently suffer to phase outs of existing means-tested benefits.
Would be great, but human nature is to want more stuff, money and power.
On the upside, many "new" sectors don't use natural resources, except human time. E.g. writing blog posts, social media management, doing marketing campaigns for Gucci. Growth in those sectors should be (mostly) easy on the planet.
> Would be great, but human nature is to want more stuff, money and power.
A lot of HN lives in an upper-middle class first world bubble. Median global income is $2900 per year. That's less than $10 a day.
For the vast majority of the world, economic growth isn't about "stuff, money and power". It's about escaping abject poverty. It's about reliable access to running water, electricity, shelter, and food.
Exactly this. Without stuff to sell, those "industries" wouldn't really exist. If your blog relies on ad revenue and you have nothing to advertise you're not making money. Gucci doesn't need to advertise if there's no competition to Gucci.
On the other hand nobody is going to die because society decided it no longer needed Gucci. There is a strong argument we would be better off without them.
This idea is a kind of calamity. They’re proposing to increase poverty worldwide when we haven’t even managed to get everybody over $2 a day of consumption, or bring child mortality down to rates that would have been acceptable in the US in 1950.
Like I said, the specifics are certainly open to ridicule. But I don't think you can dismiss the idea that we need to find a way to live without economic growth. I think we still have room for some growth, but not for long. If we keep to the status quo, waste heat from energy production alone will grow to disastrous levels within a few centuries.
This is very un-evenly distributed growth however. Developed nations are at or below sustenance level birth rates and largely rely on immigration to break even. As countries develop, birth rates decline -- this is well documented and incredibly striking. Check out this graph of birth rate vs. HDI [1]. As the rest of the world develops, the curve will invert and turn negative, it's just a matter of time.
Aren't we past the point of having too much? Making plastic single use goods obsolete and reducing all the Amazon purchases that get used once if ever would reduce total output. More focus could be put on quality (I know this can't be defined) products, rather that just driving blind consumerism.
That doesn't necessarily need to be so. Developed economies often end up with below-replacement birthrates (see japan-- it's the direction the western world is headed)
At e.g. 2.3% yearly growth in energy usage, humanity would use the sun's entire output in roughly 1400 years time and the entire galaxy's energy output in about 2400 years.[1]
I'm all for space exploration and colonization, but I'm sceptical it can solve the growth problem. I mean, what happens on Earth?
Fair enough. That's quicker than I would have guessed, but exponentials are pretty powerful.
If the growth is 1%, then we are good for ~3000 years, even in just our solar system. A tenth of a percent would give us ~30k years in the solar system.
Although, very very low growth would last quite some time on the galactic scale. A hundredth of a percent would give us more than 500k years to reach galactic energy levels. Which may actually be realistic given the difficulties of interstellar travel and cosmic scale engineering.
But yes, it seems that in the next few tens of thousands of years, barring an Earth-shattering revolution in our understanding of energy, we will likely have to learn to live in something much closer to a steady-state system, at least in this solar system.
And even such a paradigm shift would just push out the deadline. But I do think such nitty gritty details of when and how the ceiling is hit will effect how things play out.
I'm pretty far on the left and used to be active in communist politics (little bit less exceptional here in Europe than across the pond), but I've always been very irritated by these degrowth movements, although a lot of this stuff came out of 'my' political tent.
It's to me reminiscent of the 'deep ecology' folks, who don't pursue environmentalism with the goal of furthering human well-being, but have a quasi religious attitude to nature as if it is a thing in itself. If you want to have a life of leisure and cooperation, you need material progress and abstract away all the nasty and brutish things which is only achievable in an environment of abundance.
Degrowth will produce the exact opposite. Scarcity, tribalism, zero-sum competition and so on.
Degrowth has never been in the same "political tent" as "communism" (by which I assume you mean Marx/Engels-based socialism?)
The idea that human well-being is central, while nature is just a resource used to achieve abundance is completely opposite to the philosophy of the degrowth movement.
If it's not in the same political camp then why does the article say that we need to redistribute our resources before we can even start with degrowth? They're basically asking for the same thing communists are asking for.
Where ? I see "before", not "after".
> This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.
And equating redistribution with communism is silly - top income tax rates in the US were the highest - around 80%-90% during MacCarthyism !
Jeffrey Sachs[1] put forward $10,000 USD per person as a sustainable sized economy. For most in the world this would be a massive improvement. It was a few years ago now, thanks to our inaction it’s probably lower now.
What's stopping them? There's tons of empty land in the world. Go find a stream in the forest and live a sustenance-level life. Oh, they want everyone else to be miserable too.
Perhaps you know this already, but they would be outcompeted very quickly and disappear (like the shakers). It’s like how paying extra taxes voluntarily isn’t a substitute for wanting increased taxation.
Wait a few decades and see if it exuberant growth ... What I think is that we might price natural resources much more expensively. Higher Price and thus growth is not always synonymous with more resources. It is an approximation but better means higher price not more resources.
See, that wouldn't work because if everyone is rich nobody is. As countries develop and education improves, birth rate declines strikingly [1]. As we continue to automate, the number of people we need working to support us declines, too. Naturally, even if the economy remained the same size, per capita yields over time would increase.
We don't need as many people on earth as we have to sustain ourselves, and the population will naturally right-size over time. Unfortunately there'll be a painful transition period where there's more people than work to do. We can either make work, kill people, or we can pay people to stay home and do... whatever. I'm very much in favor of the latter.
Many people derive their identity, sense of self and satisfaction from what they do. Those people will continue to work. Some will stay home and pursue liberal arts or stay-at-home parenting. All that is fine.
The inescapable future, though, is that medicine, law, manufacturing, farming -- everything we do -- will be automated. This will free us to pursue our passions whatever they may be. In the interim, we've got basic income. To be clear, this still leaves room in society for wealth and income inequality as a motivator -- you can still be fabulously wealthy in a world where the poor are healthy and secure. We're just talking about bumping up the bottom line so the alternative isn't death and suffering.
Even though this is the most misanthropic comment I've ever seen on HN and I'm appalled you would consider writing it, I'll play along! Killing the only people advocating for their movement would make the movement very unlikely to succeed.
See the whole "while it would make the movement unlikely to succeed" is what I hear from politicians explaining why they don't refuse corporate donations like pledging to fight corporate greed. These people are PART of growth...
>Even though this is the most misanthropic comment I've ever seen on HN and I'm appalled you would consider writing it, I'll play along!
This modest proposal being pushed to shrink the economy would ultimately result in millions of deaths as a direct consequence. Its not a big leap to be in favor of causing death directly instead of through effective democide. I'm wondering what their position on human life is.
I apologize for the wall of text. I hope someone finds it interesting.
I think people in the West assume that because we are freer than most that we are not drowning in propaganda. Money really does run the show this planet over. Money and power really do seem to bring the worst out of people.
Economic growth is only needed for Ponzi economics, whether that be retirement funds, Social Security or stock market returns. Human beings are not some living aberration that requires growth or we die. Growth is only "needed" by the financial industry and holders of equities. As growing social unrest increases, and it will, people will slowly realize that consumption of cheap Chinese electronics do not make them happy. This idea that once we get over the hurdle of 100% automation we will all be able to live work and stress free in our post automation utopia where people can focus on the things that give them "meaning" and make them "happy" is absurd. Basic Income as a panacea for the lower class is another ridiculous idea that can only be imagined being successful if you first image human beings as blank slates whose programing is purely cultural and devoid of millions of years of instinctual hardwiring. The only thing I see Basic Income providing is as cultural grease (as in bribe) to keep people from rioting. The "need" for immigration is another epic lie needed only to keep the Ponzi scheme going. It blows my mind that the left let this made-in-marketing-heaven line of propaganda slide: "immigration is needed to supply the jobs that Americans don't want to do". It even sounds like a corporate slogan. Holy shit the gas-lighting. This is wage suppression. Americans don't want to do those jobs for what you want to pay them when you can instead take advantage of someone from a poor and broken country. This was big business stealing from Americans and it has contributed to the decline of the middle class. People seem to forget, or maybe they don't know, that the middle class was created through policy, just as it is now being dismantled through policy. Instead of this issue being talked about honestly we are told to ridicule those "xenophobes" who dare suggest that Americans could/should be doing those jobs for a non artificially lowered wage. Off-shoring and immigration are the same thing and no one is honest about this. They are supported by the same forces, for the same Ponzi effect, for the same concentration of wealth causing the growing income disparity we see. The "need" for immigration is also about the higher abstraction of the population Ponzi scheme. We as human being do not need to grow to thrive. There is no need to see just how many billions of us this planet and technology can sustain before biblical levels of suffering ensue. Europe importing millions of "refugees" (migrants)/immigrants to "fill the void" is purely the greed and entitlement of the Elites. They feel entitled to Ponzi economic comforts even though they did have to children themselves to support it. Less people means less load on the environment and less fighting over resources. This is a great thing especially for the environment as well as for everyone else on the planet not just those in Europe. Jared Diamond in his book Upheaval very slyly points out that immigration from the third world into the first world increases environmental problems by increasing gross carbon emissions and overconsumption. Yet as much as Diamond is loved by the left this is ignored, as if he didn't say it. Again the propaganda pumped out is multiculturalism and "diversity is our strength". Japan and the Norwegian countries beg to differ and are looked up to as models. Immigration is pushed to keep the Ponzi scheme going and to increase the Democrat voting base and not to give you more choices in local cuisine. The bullshit is miles high.
Can you really not envision a thriving human race without growth? International finance and corporate banking really do need growth. Either way economic growth is not sustainable indefinitely. Technology will not enable us to colonize the Universe anytime soon. Self driving cars are not happening in the next decade and the singularity is not happening in the next 5 decades, at least.
Looking through the comments I see multiple posts suggesting that non growth equals lowered standard of living. Standard of living has all ready started falling in America, most likely due to income disparity. Japan has not had much economic growth for the last 20 years yet they are living in the future. I have visited Japan, it's incredible. Japan feels like a future I'm not sure a multicultural country like American can ever achieve. Regardless, Ponzi economics is not necessary for anything other than easy money, especially for the Elites. Someone down at the bottom mentions Ted Kaczynski as a "far-right [thinker]". I think not. If you remove his savage deconstruction of leftism and academia from his writings he would be considered far left-wing. His philosophy is left-wing environmentalism and anti capitalism/tehcnology.
>After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.
So, this movement is communism by another name? I understand that the new bit is the reduction energy consumption and quality of life, but it seems to me that they first need to get to the communist stage and then they'll shrink the economy. In other words: it's a fantasy.
