[HN Gopher] People are realizing that degrowth is bad
___________________________________________________________________
People are realizing that degrowth is bad
Author : atlasunshrugged
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-09-06 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noahpinion.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (noahpinion.substack.com)
| rsp1984 wrote:
| The problem with his argument is not that the economy can't grow
| using less resources, that I agree with, it's that he equates a
| _fixed supply_ of resources on the one side with a steady or
| falling (but non-zero) _rate of consumption_ on the other side.
| However there are some resources that don 't just replenish
| themselves and once they're gone, they're gone. So rate of
| consumption would have to trend to zero to be sustainable, not
| just stay flat.
| anemoiac wrote:
| Some may be, but others are realizing the opposite.
| samhw wrote:
| FWIW, this view is normally referred to as
| [cornucopianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian):
| this debate has been raging since at least the 1960s, and there
| are some interesting links from the Wikipedia page.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| We know that infinite growth is not possible on a finite
| planet. I also don't think we will be doing asteroid mining
| etc. on any scale or timeframe relevant to the current
| climate crisis.
|
| Therefore we know there is some limit - and we are just
| arguing about where that limit is.
|
| The Global Footprint Network with their "Overshoot Day"
| believe we are already beyond that sustainable limit and, to
| be honest, with increasing populations that (quite rightly)
| demand Western living standards, I doubt we will ever be
| sustainable.
| samhw wrote:
| I'm not sure why infinite growth wouldn't be possible on a
| finite planet (even if we assume that "on a finite planet"
| is indeed a real constraint). Growth doesn't imply greater
| resource use.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Even if the economy were dominated by the creation and
| consumption of .mp3 files, an exponentially growing
| economy would eventually run out of server space and
| electricity on a finite planet.
| amcvitty wrote:
| If you're among those others, I'd be really interested to hear
| a critique of the article. It seemed pretty convincing to me,
| as well as constructive by suggesting that green investment is
| the right path forward
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S
| 14629...
| hannob wrote:
| I'll give you one example which I find pretty convincing:
|
| Take aviation. You can make aviation green by using hydrogen
| (on medium distances), batteries (on short distances) or
| efuels (everywhere, it's basically kerosene, but made with
| renewable electricity). Ok, great.
|
| Now there's an EU research project that has run some numbers.
| Note that this project happened in collaboration with
| aviation companies, it's unlikely to paint a particularly
| pessimistic picture. Page 44 here:
| https://www.cleansky.eu/sites/default/files/inline-
| files/202...
|
| Their calculation is that you need between 21 and 32
| Petawatthours per year to green aviation (depending on how
| optimistic you are about hydrogen-based aviation). That is
| around the same as the total amount of electricity the world
| uses today (all electricity, not just green electricity).
|
| They assume a 4 percent growth rate for aviation, which is in
| line with what aviation organizations expect.
|
| I have trouble imagining that this is realistic. Like: I'm
| pretty optimistic about renewable energy. But I just don't
| think it's very plausible to say: "We'll make all our
| electricity green, and then we'll add the same amount in
| green electricity _just for aviation_ , and oh, we'll
| probably do the same for a bunch of other industry sectors
| that will need similar amounts" (there are studies with
| similar numbers e.g. for the chemical industry). Like I just
| don't think it's plausible to green all electricity and then
| grow the electricity sector by something like 500% in a short
| amount of time.
|
| And when you come to the conclusion that this is not
| realistic you should start to wonder if you should really
| assume that aviation will just continue to grow and grow.
| (And the same is pretty much true for a lot of sectors where
| greening is not impossible, but challenging.)
| dalbasal wrote:
| So... I had a green-marxist mate in college. Everyone should have
| one. Great chat at summer bbqs. I believe he has since run for
| state office in Victoria, at some point. He introduced me to the
| anti-growth stance, emphasising historical relationships between
| consumption, wealth & growth to resource depletion, pollution,
| ecosystem destruction & such.
|
| The arguments made by this article did occur to me. Consumption
| != tonnage. "Economic Growth" is very abstract, an abundance of
| pricy yoga lessons is not environmentally destructive.
|
| The communist's retort to the retort also followed this blog's
| reasoning: " _Yeah but all that C02, pollution and destruction
| stuff does equal growth IRL. Maybe past trends aren 't the final
| say, but Why TF do you expect next decade (2005-2015) will be
| less filthy than the last?! Don't give me "could be's."_" - ..We
| sip wine from a plastic cask thing that students drink.
|
| My retort to that would have been: _" Real life? Pfff! Pfff, I
| say. How exactly do you expect economic reverse gear to play out
| IRL. Poverty makes for some real political nastiness?! _
|
| From here unto "politics" and away we go... just like this blog,
| which is quite a good rendering of the debate IMO. Well written.
|
| Abstract, vast concepts like "growth," "consumption," "politics,"
| "earth" and such Grand Abstractions make these debates both
| impossible and unavoidable. Everything seems to come into it and
| lead to it. I've changed my opinions here many times over the
| years.
|
| I was getting a circa-2005 econ education att. Peak monetarism,
| conservative ascendance and perhaps the neoliberal highpoint. I
| was also studying philosophy, so had the ways, means and student
| bumminess to look into old marxist and hegelian retorts to pose
| this communist dude at our next drinking session. It's always fun
| to ambush a believer with their own unread sacred texts... It's
| good headology, so says the witch.
|
| I don't remember what came of that ATT, but these days Hegelian
| swinginess tends to frame a lot of my thoughts on such grand
| questions. Maybe the damned communist did manage to sneak some of
| his religion into _me_ , in a roundabout way.
|
| Marx & early communists were actually pretty awed by technology,
| growth and such. The promise of abundance and changeful times was
| one of the things that enabled radically different thinking about
| the _future_. The future would not be like the past, or present.
| You might be surprised to hear that communists were kind of right
| about a lot of "peak capitalism" concepts. A lot of markets did
| peak, margins and even market size did whittle to nothing.
| "Politics" dictates much, at this point. Monopolies or
| "structured markets," in modern parlance dictate much, at this
| point. Textile markets went through it. Coal. Fishing. Arguably
| cars.
|
| "Peak capitalism-ish" dynamics played prominently in the
| economies of the late 1800s and this lasted generations. They're
| not always the biggest economic happening everywhere & at all
| times, but they usually appear multiple times on a top 10 list of
| major issues.
|
| To bring this ramble back to the start.... Aggregation is an
| abstraction, a necessary one to reason about these questions.
| "Growth" of "Stuff" is abstract. It leaks. But, it also holds
| water. Ignoring the leak caused Keynes, as well as most
| economists of his day (1920s) to expect extreme abundance soon...
| famously, a 15 hr, men-only workweek by the 1980s.
|
| Neither communists nor liberals really accounted for the
| difference between how "growth" would impact simple manufactured
| goods like spoons, microwaves & calories relative and housing or
| personal transport. Some became much more abundant than the
| others. Back then, a lot of people had basic housing with little
| or no furniture & possessions. Today, a poverty predicament will
| often be " _no housing, furniture gets dumped._ " Abundance works
| in mysterious ways, and scarcity hounds us still.
|
| We certainly need to degrow our negatives. We also, IMO just as
| certainly, need to grow the stuff we need more of. We need to
| avoid getting so stuck in frames that we can't see out of them.
| Some questions are hard, like transport. Hard, but not impossible
| and there are real options.
|
| Some, we stopped thinking clearly about long ago. Housing is
| often _less_ abundant than 100 years ago. Yes, our standards for
| "decent housing" have risen. But that is far from abundance. In
| other areas we're far from sustainability.
| FooHentai wrote:
| >"Essentially, the idea that economic growth requires growth in
| resource use is false; rich countries have started to grow while
| using less and less of the planet's most important resources."
|
| Service economies rise off the backs of offshoring primary and
| secondary production to developing economies. None of that stuff
| exists without the underlying production, which absolutely
| depends on extraction of biosphere resources.
|
| Good luck growing your university-educated, service economy
| cities without the raw material and fossil fuel abundance it
| currently relies on. Being increasing abstracted from your
| foundations may feel secure but you'll topple just the same when
| they give way, even thousands of floors above.
|
| You could perhaps make an argument that more layers of leverage
| could be layered on top of existing levels of productive
| extraction, but when we're talking about a reduction (by choice
| or circumstance) in the underlying raw extractive activity,
| that's insufficient.
|
| >"The kind of massive intention reordering of global production
| and consumption that degrowthers fantasize about is not just
| pragmatically impossible to implement, it's the kind of thing
| that essentially everyone in the world except for a few very
| shouty people in Northern Europe and the occasional Twitter
| activist is going to reject."
|
| Can't disagree with this. But the proposed alternative seems just
| as untenable:
|
| >"Making a rapid transition to green, sustainable growth will
| require huge new investments"
|
| Putting aside the energy density and portability issues, and the
| stuff about rare mineral extraction, base load etc etc etc...
| Perhaps if the current economic irrationality we've had hanging
| around since 2008 of an essentially unbounded slush fund of
| capital that somehow never significantly depreciates perpetuates
| forever onwards, this kind of thing could be pulled off. I'm
| unconvinced that we've entered some kind of calm water beyond our
| historical cycles of boom and bust, rather that we're in an
| extended period of irrationality yet to come down to earth.
| Still, nice to be hopeful. Just strikes me that both possible
| futures are equally unlikely, much as either one of them would be
| wonderful if they came to pass. Certainly better than the (IMO)
| more likely other way this all goes.
| boudin wrote:
| I agree, it's impossible to look at a country alone in a world
| economy.
|
| Claiming that services like social media do not rely on higher
| consumption of raw materials is really far fetch. Good luck
| building growing a service like Facebook without: - growing
| mobile phone market - growing mobile network market - growing
| internet access - growing your servers behind it - the energy
| consumption associated with it
|
| It's quite easy to ignore facts when omitting that the majority
| of the supply chain and user base behind that is not located in
| the US. I'm fairly confident that adding those numbers to those
| charts will give a different picture indeed
| taffer wrote:
| This is mentioned in the article: _...this is not because of
| outsourcing, as you can see by looking at the trade-adjusted
| emissions numbers._
|
| This is the relevant graph:
| https://www.nuestromundoendatos.org/exports/production-vs-
| co...
| Ambolia wrote:
| "we can raise human living standards without exhausting the
| planet."
|
| How much of that has been achieved by manufacturing everything in
| China?
| bertil wrote:
| Degrowth arguments is not lowering your consumption is enjoyable
| or popular; some might have written effusively about
| rediscovering vegan cuisine but I'd blame cookbooks usual
| enthusiasm for that one. Greta Thunberg was quite candid about
| how sailing the Atlantic was painful.
|
| Degrowth argues that technological innovation won't be enough to
| save biodiversity and decarbonise in time.
|
| If you want to prove them wrong, don't call them smelly hippies
| on a "grandiose world-saving moral quest": that helps no one.
| Instead, invent electric cars, solar and wind energy, CO2 capture
| solutions, protein sources, etc. that are so cheap that you can
| replace alternatives. Whether those are 'better' can be
| subjective.
|
| The article would be more convincing if it described the day in
| the life of someone with a middle-class Western lifestyle with no
| carbon footprint and not destroying wildlife habitats. By saying
| that current alternatives are not encouraging, he's arguing for
| degrowth (or catastrophic environmental changes) not against.
| Certhas wrote:
| Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long
| run.
|
| But more importantly I see some reasonable degrowth arguments as
| advocating an end to consumerism. To no longer measure the wealth
| of a country by the extend of it's material consumption and
| financial transactions. We are optimizing the wrong thing.
| Imagine a world with a basic income, where someone who just likes
| to cut hair decides to cut hair for other people as long as they
| get to be creative while doing it. This would lower the GDP and
| nominally be degrowth, but not because the scope and range of
| possible human activities has decreased.
|
| We have coupled status to consumption, money and being
| productive. I believe that this has become the overwhelming
| function of much economic activity. Otherwise it's not rationally
| understandable why people would opt to work 70 hours a week,
| barely know their kids, in order to make sure they can afford
| things they don't really need.
|
| I don't really see the article(s) linked contradicting this line
| of thought in the degrowth community.
| boxed wrote:
| Fundamentally there isn't any exponential growth and has never
| been any. And it would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
|
| We have S curves. Lots of them. We're seeing the slowdown of
| the semiconductor industry S curve now. But we get new S curves
| in the beginning phases all the time. That's why we keep having
| so great growth.
|
| But de-growth is just a weird concept. Why would we need it?
| What does it even mean? Would we burn all the books so we
| become ignorant about technology? I hope not!
| imtringued wrote:
| I assume it means letting the economy run at the highest
| sustainable level, rather than insisting on a certain
| velocity of progress.
| shele wrote:
| There is this S-curve of the amount of newly starting
| S-curves where we are going to see a slowdown...
| piokoch wrote:
| World with basic income might create a class of people, who
| will demand to increase it (because why not, people who are not
| working and will be given some money for this will have a lot
| of time to organize themselves in some kind of strange union),
| if this group will be large enough it will soon find a
| political party that will absorb such group.
|
| However to give away money, you need to get them from
| somewhere, basic income means that work will be taxed more
| heavily. At some point this will break economy and, in less
| optimistic scenario, lead to social unrest or takeover of the
| power by some ultra populist party - we have already seen in
| the history how helping the poor, discriminated "class"
| typically ends.
| endymi0n wrote:
| > Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the
| long run.
|
| Besides being a fundamentally politically charged statement, I
| see no good argument on why not, so I'm sure you're ready to
| present some evidence behind that.
|
| Where you're completely right is that fundamental exponential
| resource usage is not sustainable.
|
| But in fact, OP makes a pretty convincing argument that
| resource usage is starting to decouple from GDP growth (in
| fact, exponentially so).
|
| Adding the exponentially growing level of automation and still-
| dropping cost-effective renewables into the mix (as well as
| their synergetic effect on each other), it's a rationally
| following thought that energy will be almost-free in the near
| future.
|
| With an exponential growth of external (solar) energy into the
| system, it's not far off to channel this energy into GDP to
| sustain the growth.
|
| Just one example: Water problem. There's a drinking water
| shortage everywhere but if you look at the globe from orbit,
| you see the planet does not have a water shortage.
|
| In fact, it's just an energy shortage of desalinating that
| water. Bring that almost-free water to the deserts around the
| equator and you're in fact creating resources.
|
| I think the idea of degrowth is a fundamental error. It's only
| when the ecological finally gets economical when you convince
| the naysayers as well.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| Then what do you do with the salt when you have exponentially
| desalinated amounts of water? Managing it is already a
| problem with our limited amounts of desalination.
|
| Growth has consequences. People who optimize for economic
| gain are paid in part to conceal negative consequences to
| keep their short term gains from being inhibited.
|
| If you can attain exponential growth without consequence,
| you've found a way to simply create matter or violate some
| law of physics, and honestly, that's a bigger scientific
| achievement than economic.
| endymi0n wrote:
| It's not that there won't be consequences. I'm just firmly
| believing in a possibility of managing those and be better
| off afterwards. Supposing free energy and a common goal of
| not letting salinity increase, why not invest a bit more
| energy of extracting 100% of the water and just piling it
| up on a mountain? Salt is benign. We've pulled it from the
| ground below. We can put it back. Sea level's currently
| rising anyway, so we're synergetic.
|
| We'll find a way if there is growth to sustaing it. On the
| contrary, degrowth will just lead to shrinkage and the
| zero-sum mindset behind will soon create fights for all the
| resources perceived as limited, distracting from the
| climate crisis. IMHO that's the only sure way to lose the
| fight against climate change.
| trainsplanes wrote:
| Free energy isn't a thing. There's a cost to building it.
| Mining absolutely wrecks environments.
|
| And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a
| mountainside is no different from what humanity has been
| doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that
| currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next
| generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes.
| We've done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive
| and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones
| and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground
| water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc.
| All those were great in small amounts, then people
| realized they could pretend there were no consequences to
| milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels
| and countless other environmental problems, all because
| people previously avoided accepting consequences later
| on.
| Certhas wrote:
| The universe is finite, it's very big but finite. All growth
| eventually hits limits. Exponential growth hits the limits in
| logarithmic time. The question is just whether this brings
| the time scale to time scales that humans can and should care
| about.
|
| It's also a straw-man to imply that degrowth advocates want
| to eliminate all development. Nobody I know (but I am not
| that well read in the field, maybe it's just my pocket) is
| talking about stopping technological research, or science, or
| cultural growth. It's about the subset of human activities
| that are today labelled as economic.
| zzzzzzzza wrote:
| economic aka satisfying other people's desires but not my
| own
| Certhas wrote:
| Have you never done anything for anyone without being
| paid for it?
|
| I believe the fundamental model of having money and
| passing it around, and thereby acknowledging that we do
| things for each other is absolutely fantastic. But the
| secondary effects absolutely swamp the primary purpose by
| now.
|
| I can do things for other people, but I can also run ad
| campaigns, or engineer the culture in such a way that
| they will desire what I can produce. Desires are not a
| preexisting thing that a disinterested economic system is
| more and more efficiently satisfying. The desires are
| shaped by the wider social system of which the economic
| system and its intrinsic logic is a core part.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| desalinate exponentially more water every year and you'll run
| out of ocean on a surprisingly short time scale. Any
| exponential progression gets absurd on a surprisingly short
| time scale.
|
| In actual fact, most markets and technology follow something
| more like and S-curve, with exponential growth in the first
| half and exponential decay in the second. We need a viable
| economic theory for the second half. "resource usage is
| starting to decouple from GDP growth" sounds like it's
| referring to being in the second half, without recognising
| the absurdity of pretending something is growing
| exponentially when it's value is still measured in terms of
| whatever is still rare.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _Imagine a world...where someone who just likes to cut hair
| decides to cut hair for other people as long as they get to be
| creative while doing it._
|
| It sounds wonderful. Here's the problem. Most people don't want
| a creative hair cut. Most people want the same boring haircut
| everybody else has. And they need it now, not when you're
| feeling "inspired" or "creative."
|
| A world where nobody is incentivized to provide value to others
| aside from "creative satisfaction," is a world where _nobody
| provides value to others._
|
| Whether or not you agree with all the things people buy, the
| fact is, most people buy most things because they find them
| useful (the top GDP-contributing activities are rooted in
| things like food, water, housing, transportation, clothing,
| etc.)
|
| Ending consumerism, means _the end of people doing useful
| things for each other._
|
| This includes all the peaceful global cooperation between
| countries that is a byproduct of a consumer driven global
| economy.
|
| I don't think changing the mindset of countries with nuclear
| weapons from optimistic growth to pessimistic scarcity is going
| to have the positive outcomes you think it will.
|
| Unfortunately, when humans fight over scarce things, they tend
| to kill each other.
| smolder wrote:
| > Whether or not you agree with all the things people buy,
| the fact is, most people buy most things because they find
| them useful
|
| This requires a loose definition of "useful" which includes
| status signalling, satisfying an impulse to buy things, and
| so on, to the point it's tautological; every action is
| useful. I would not attribute the bulk of consumer spending
| to an expectation of usefulness, otherwise. Among the useful
| things, people still spend extra to buy pleasure foods,
| pleasure clothes, pleasure housing, pleasure transportation.
|
| > Ending consumerism, means the end of people doing useful
| things for each other.
|
| I think if you look at how consumerism is defined, it's
| apparent we can have the exchange of goods and services
| without it. Economic systems can exist without consumerism,
| and existed before it.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Agreed. I think there are a lot of policy makers who have a LOT
| of trouble coping with the idea that humans aren't primarily
| rational actors contributing to a self-regulating market system
| in all things...
|
| People seek consumption, money, and power. There's no real
| self-regulating mechanism for any of these things, as far as
| the drives of the humans that manifest those outcomes. We don't
| automatically have an 'enough' meter. As such, we don't manage
| ourselves well, and it falls to larger systems to identify
| these losses and mitigate them... which is always contentious.
|
| I always feel these 'actually exponential growth is good'
| arguments end up resting on suspicious grounds. They fall into
| the category of moral arguments, where the moral is 'I should
| not have to examine or curtail my own whims'.
| mmarq wrote:
| > Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the
| long run.
|
| Growth doesn't mean that we make materially more things, but
| that we make better things. Compared to a torch, a calculator,
| a phone, a GameBoy, etc... an iPhone requires far less raw
| materials. This can be applied to any industry, so exponential
| growth is indeed possible.
|
| We don't need to work more or consume more things unless we
| either give up on innovation or if we think innovation is not
| possible because we have reached a knowledge boundary. The
| former would be a silly decision to make, the latter is an
| assumption that should be demonstrated.
| jccodez wrote:
| i love my headphone jack on my 6s, its very innovative. talk
| about ioc.
| agent008t wrote:
| Some (a lot?) of economic activity seems to be self-serving,
| not making our lives better (and sometimes making them
| worse). The lockdowns demonstrated that very well. For
| example: social media (doesn't add anything beneficial, makes
| us less social); 'influencers'; a good chunk of the
| hospitality industry; anything to do with crypto.
|
| Very often, free alternatives / those not involving 3rd
| parties, simpler living, are better for us overall. But if
| more expensive options are available, we are pressured to
| take them so that we are not left behind / feel like we fit
| in / have a social life.
|
| Also, at some point certain things are just 'good enough',
| and marginal improvements require a ton of effort but don't
| make life better. For example, mobile phones - an 8 year old
| phone would work just fine, if not for forced obsoletion. Yet
| tons of effort go into very marginal improvements, because if
| you don't do it, your competitors will.
| mmarq wrote:
| > Also, at some point certain things are just 'good
| enough', and marginal improvements require a ton of effort
| but don't make life better. For example, mobile phones - an
| 8 year old phone would work just fine, if not for forced
| obsoletion. Yet tons of effort go into very marginal
| improvements, because if you don't do it, your competitors
| will.
|
| If this were true, your innovating competitors will lose
| money. There's a discussion to be had on bad innovations
| (such as almost everything related to the so-called
| "attention economy), but they are a drop in the ocean.
| agent008t wrote:
| There are a lot of reasons to get the newest phone with
| the best features, and many of those reasons are not
| wholesome ones.
|
| For example, my iPhone 6 is getting obsolete just because
| it would not get latest iOS updates. Many apps are no
| longer supporting the old OS version. Yet these apps are
| not video games requiring the latest hardware - they are
| simply glorified web pages. There is no objective reason
| for why the phone could not run them.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > social media (doesn't add anything beneficial, makes us
| less social)
|
| People in a lot of places literally couldn't socialise
| physically for much of the last 18 months, surely social
| media must have helped?
|
| Like one can argue that it's a cure worse than the
| diseases, but it's difficult to say that it's entirely
| useless.
| agent008t wrote:
| It is worse than useless. You do not need social media to
| call someone - on phone or on video, to send an email,
| organize an online game, chat on whatever messenger (Why
| do we need a new one every few months?) or even send a
| snail mail letter. Even an old-style message board is
| better for social interactions than social media.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| you probably ignore the amount of raw materials needed to
| produce your iPhone (not what actually ends up in the product
| itself). No, that's not an argument. The only argument is
| that you can keep growing by not selling anything material at
| all, like insurances, but with finite, actually soon
| degrowing population, how would you even think of doing it?
| Applejinx wrote:
| If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to make
| than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from raw
| sand.
|
| I think if you correctly account for all the materials
| required to support every last stage of process from dirt,
| ore and sand all the way to the finished iPhone, the result
| would be awe-inspiring and dismaying.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| > If you think an iPhone requires less raw materials to
| make than a torch, please go ahead and hand-sculpt one from
| raw sand.
|
| What a silly assertion. The mere fact you can't create
| something easily does not mean it does not necessitate less
| resources to build. The support system an supply chain is
| huge, but the resources it uses could be quite small if you
| divide by the number of units produced.
|
| Even so, there are many tools that a smartphone replaces
| that would have needed in the past a full product just to
| do a single thing. It can replace a PC, a game console, a
| tv, a flashlight, a calculator, tons of books, measuring
| instruments, keys. Many many things that have now moved
| into one small device. Maybe the resources for a torch are
| not more than for a iPhone, but adding all the functions it
| fills, surely, it is more resource efficient than the past
| alternatives.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Your latter point is good. That kind of consolidation of
| purpose is really handy, indeed I think it's the future
| of resource management. We can work out how to
| efficiently use these things.
|
| Former point? No. Do you have any idea how much energy it
| takes to smelt aluminum, or form a CPU-ready silicon
| wafer? Wood for torches grows out of the ground. You
| don't seem to have any idea of supply chain
| infrastructure, and it matters. There's a fairly close
| mapping between the amount of infrastructure involved,
| and the cost of the thing (Veblen goods aside). You can
| buy a flammable stick fairly cheaply, but buying a
| smartphone really does not wind up being the cost of the
| raw materials or even close... and this is because you're
| not looking at the infrastructure costs of producing the
| final result.
|
| Sorry, you're way off base. Smart technological stuff is
| really cool in its own right, but it's mind-bogglingly
| wasteful by 'degrowth' standards.
| bildung wrote:
| _> Growth doesn't mean that we make materially more things,
| but that we make better things. Compared to a torch, a
| calculator, a phone, a GameBoy, etc... an iPhone requires far
| less raw materials. This can be applied to any industry, so
| exponential growth is indeed possible._
|
| In the debate, this is called decoupling, meaning the
| decoupling of rising material and/or energy consumption with
| economic growth.
|
| The problem is that absolute decoupling couldn't been shown
| _anywhere_ , when looking at actual empirical data. This is a
| pretty exhaustive summary of current research about this:
| https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
| boudin wrote:
| Is this really true? All those objects are fairly low tech,
| between the lifetime of a torch or calculator which is way
| longer than the one of an iphone and the simpler production
| process behind it, I wouldn't be surprised that producing an
| iphone requires more materials, generates more defects for
| one working device and requires an way more complex supply
| chain.
| mmarq wrote:
| The very fact that my iPhone is lighter than my father's
| calculator, should say something at least about raw
| materials.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| well, have you considered how much material is used for
| producing that iPhone? have you got an idea of how much
| water is used for that tshirt you probably wearing right
| now?
| mmarq wrote:
| Lots of material would go into the production of all the
| tools it replaces. A programmable calculator, a mobile
| phone a GameBoy, a music player, my mother's cook books,
| etc... combined will likely require more raw materials.
| boudin wrote:
| First, that might just mean that you live at a higher
| altitude than your father, but I guess you meant mass.
|
| Then, it might just mean that your father's calculator
| use material of higher density.
|
| More seriously. when building something, there's a lot
| more material than what comes in the final product: - the
| scrap generated by the by the manufacturing process. The
| more elements, the more it's going to be. - the number of
| defects, for every parts of the device (for some parts it
| will be extremely low, for some it would be quite higher,
| but there's always some). Granted, some defects can be
| re-purposed, but it's not always the case - The raw
| materials to actually manufacture (like water) - The
| average number of repairs required over a lifetime
| (replacing the screen on a iphone is quite frequent) -
| The materials required to build the supply chain that can
| build such devices. - The materials required to generate
| the energy required to build the factories.
|
| And there's plenty of other things to take into account.
| In the end it's not about the volume of raw material as
| such, that doesn't mean much as it is. It's for each
| material, to take into consideration if it's renewable,
| what's the impact of extracting it and many other
| questions.
| mmarq wrote:
| I think it's undeniable that iPhone uses less materials
| than all the objects it replaces combined, even if it
| consumes more materials and pollutes more than a 1970s
| programmable calculator (and I'm not too sure about
| that), it certainly requires less resources than a
| calculator plus a mobile phone plus a stereo plus
| blablabla
| boudin wrote:
| It's not undeniable at all, you made an assertion without
| any base. This is far from being obvious, there's way too
| much things to take into consideration to be able to make
| such claim out of thin air.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Similarly, my bicycle is lighter than my father's horse.
|
| Mass alone does not tell the whole story.
| taneq wrote:
| I'm actually curious, which one DOES take more resources
| all up? And what do you count as a resource? ie. the
| bicycle would take far more coal and iron ore (neither of
| which the horse needs) but the horse would use up far
| more water and otherwise edible grains.
| imtringued wrote:
| An electric bike does not need to be fed with crops.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| The horse also generates more power than a human on a
| bicycle.
|
| The horse does not need improved roads the way most
| bicycles do, and is more reliable off road than most
| mountain bikes.
|
| Lots of food for thought here.
| boudin wrote:
| There's actually more to take into account to push the
| subject a lot. The human on a bicycle also needs food and
| water to move the bicycle. Which is the more efficient at
| converting those resources into movement and in which
| scenario ?
| mmarq wrote:
| And it also requires much less energy and maintenance to
| be produced and operated. Growth.
| toto444 wrote:
| This is discussed at length here :
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-
| physicist... and in the comments.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth
| is indeed possible.
|
| Such growth is anything but exponential. In fact, it's
| logarithmic.
| mmarq wrote:
| Maybe, I have a degree in economics, but I'm a software
| developer and not an economist. I'd say that if innovations
| are built on top of other innovations and if we get
| occasional breakthroughs, the process may be approximated
| with an exponential. Otherwise, even logarithmic growth
| tends to infinity, not to de-growth.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| If you make better things, say a car that costs half of its
| predecessors then all else being equal you have halved your
| economic output. The reality is that we use that efficiency
| to buy more so the price stays the same but cars are twice as
| big and we buy many more of them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Not entirely true.
|
| It really doesn't matter if whatever is created is better or
| just more of the same.
|
| New things will require more things.
|
| I highly recommend reading Rich Gold's excellent book The
| Plenitude:
|
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/plenitude
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Link to the ol' Economist meets a Physicist conversation:
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
|
| "The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen
| to represent a 10x increase every century), we would reach
| boiling temperature in about 400 years."
| hoseja wrote:
| People are evolutionary agents.
| Cultures/states/corporations/memes are evolutionary agents.
| Evolutionary agents inherently compete. Competition drives both
| progress and inefficiency. The sort of society where someone
| "who just likes to cut hair decides to cut hair for other
| people", at useful frequencies, is sadly fundamentally
| impossible unless you lobotomize everyone and install a
| hegemonic overlord meme-complex.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I hadn't even heard of this debate until now, but am already
| appalled at the polarization: "degrowthers" this, "degrowthers
| have no idea how.."
|
| It is possible to have sensible debate without immediately
| putting people into the blue or red team. We can do better than
| this.
| taneq wrote:
| > without immediately putting people into the blue or red team
|
| That's such an anti-teamer thing to say.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I wouldn't take Noah Smith all that seriously. He's a classic
| example of "bad on purpose to make you click"
| notafraudster wrote:
| You're correct; the debate is pretty arcane and the purpose of
| this particular post is mostly for Noah to lob bombs at other
| wonk bloggers he interacts with on Twitter frequently. This is
| a pathology of his writing on Substack, and actually of the
| entire Substack ecosystem more broadly. Most of the content
| produced in this ecosystem is basically "takes" on "stuff I
| heard online". See also Freddie de Boer and others. Extreme
| forest for trees problem. It's not just that it feels
| tribalistic and inaccessible to a lay audience, it's that it
| feels tribalistic and inaccessible to even a particularly
| educated and engaged audience who nevertheless don't spend all
| their time in this particular online bubble.
|
| I say this acknowledging that the actual criticisms here are
| reasonable and I don't have any particular disdain for the post
| or the discussion, just that I am totally unsurprised that you
| picked up on it being oddly insular.
| dash2 wrote:
| There's a well-defined political argument called degrowth,
| which says that we need to stop economic growth in order to
| save the planet. There are some people who put forward this
| argument. Noah Smith is arguing against them. I think it would
| be hard to do this without giving them a collective name.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Well, you don't have to. You can discuss the ideas and not
| the people.
|
| The only purpose of labeling people based on a particular
| belief/position is to make it easier to attack with
| generalizations, and polarize the debate. Now you have to
| pick a side - are you a degrowther or not?
| dash2 wrote:
| I am not sure that doing a find/replace of "degrowthers
| think" with "degrowth theory says" would really contribute
| make the debate less polarized. Maybe.
|
| There are reasons to labeling people other than those you
| suggest. For example, maybe it simply was the first way to
| express his argument that came to mind. Or maybe,
| identifying a group of people who think X can be part of
| the debate. For example, suppose libertarians are all
| funded by billionaires. That might suggest a motivation for
| libertarian thought. You couldn't know this without
| identifying the people who are libertarians.
|
| Lastly, it's often good that people have to "pick a side".
| Do you think we should aim to stop economic growth, or
| don't you? It's good that you should come to a clear
| position on this topic. Unclear positions might be nuanced,
| yes. But they might also be based on unclear thinking, or a
| desire to please everybody.
| jcims wrote:
| Is he arguing against the people or the idea?
| ianai wrote:
| I know you're right, but I often wonder what would initiate
| change.
|
| Anecdotally, I quickly tire from reading or hearing arguments
| full of the polarization labels
| (liberal/conservative/neocon/neoliberal/etc). Wonder if I'm
| alone in this.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Yeah, those labels are beyond useless, and it's just a
| shortcut for a caricature of the opponent in the mind of
| whoever uses them. E.g. someone who is vaccine-hesistant
| might be lazily pigeon-holed as a dumb racist Trump
| supporter. People use "socialism" to think Sweden but the
| other side thinks China and Nazi since they know the "zi"
| stood for socialism and that means Bernie Sanders wants to
| gas his own folk.
| rayiner wrote:
| We're not going to "degrowth." Repeat that to yourself as a
| mantra until it sinks in. There's billions of people out there
| whose standard of living is inadequate, and they're going to try
| to keep on the development curve.
|
| Okay, so what does climate response look like in that world? I
| suspect it looks like investing massive amounts of money in
| nuclear and carbon capture. Developed countries have spent
| trillions on COVID response to keep some 65+ people alive. That
| mk eh would have been far better spent on climate technology.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yes, and what's more: We have still high population growth
| rates in many areas of the world. Take Sub-Saharan Africa for
| example. Even countries like Afghanistan, where the population
| grew from 20mn in 2000 to 40mn in 2020...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's likely large cohorts of those folks are going to starve
| to death from climate change related crop failures.
| berkes wrote:
| We are going to 'degrowth' and those on the 'bottom' are going
| to suffer the most.
|
| If not voluntary, then forced. The ecosystem that carries all
| the growth is rapidly falling apart (relatively, with speed
| measured in decennia, generations or centuries). We cannot stay
| on the exponential paths we've taken the last 250 years for
| another 250 years, that is impossible. Let alone for another
| 2500 years
| harryh wrote:
| Developed economies are already not on an exponential path
| (as is made clear in the linked post if you would bother to
| read it). You are reasoning from a false premise.
| dash2 wrote:
| This seems not to address the arguments made in the article -
| for example, that economic growth, beyond a certain point, is
| mostly about "doing more with less". Maybe those arguments
| are wrong, but they need responding to.
| berkes wrote:
| The article adresses all these points on a small timescale.
|
| Just population growth alone, using the current curve
| (1.1%), will hit 118 billion people in 250 years and
| 5,812,724,005,588 billion (not a typo) people in 2500
| years. Compounding exponential growth is quite literally
| unimanigable.
|
| We cannot continue on current curves. No matter how
| efficient you make houses, produce iPads or food:
| exponential growth is unsustainable. Literally and
| figuratively.
| dash2 wrote:
| It's hard to see why "economic growth involves doing more
| with less" would work on a small timescale but not a big
| one. Indeed the main point of the article is that if you
| wait long enough, this will kick in, but that in the
| _short_ run we have a problem.
|
| The same holds for population growth. As countries get
| richer the birth rate reduces. So there's very little
| chance that we'll stay on the current 1.1% curve, any
| more than we stayed on the analogous curve defined in
| 1950.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >It's hard to see why "economic growth involves doing
| more with less" would work on a small timescale but not a
| big one.
|
| I would guess that the marginal value of cleverness or
| technology decreases over time
| harryh wrote:
| That's not what the current curve actually looks like
| though. The rate of increase is declining every year.
| There are a number of developed economies that already
| have shrinking populations.
|
| There are a couple of different population projections
| out there and, of course, predictions about the future
| are hard. But all of them show a population peak around
| 2100 of maybe 10-12 billion people.
| patcon wrote:
| > If not voluntary, then forced.
|
| Agreed. Collapse or increasing eco-terrorism is my guess.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I honestly don't know what this "de-growth" thing is about, it
| sounds suspiciously like a slur invented to label any sustainable
| economy advocate so they stop messing up industry with rules
| about how much energy or resources you can waste.
|
| And the arguing isn't great either, when saying why their
| opponents arguments are wrong they demonstrate it partially by
| the following _incredibly_ general statement:
|
| > Past trends are no guarantee of future trends
|
| and without any qualification why this would only apply to one
| sort of trend they assert their own trend as _fact_
|
| > And the fact that rich countries have hit an inflection point
| where economic growth no longer depends on growing resource
|
| Or in clearer words: " _Your_ trend is false and will break
| tomorrow, but _my_ trend is an eternal truth! ". This sort of
| bluntly self serving argument does not fill me with confidence
| that there is much carefully crafter reasoning here.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| It's not a slur or epithet:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth#Origins_of_the_moveme...
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > I honestly don't know what this "de-growth" thing is about,
| it sounds suspiciously like a slur invented to label any
| sustainable economy advocate so they stop messing up industry
| with rules about how much energy or resources you can waste.
|
| I get this as an initial reaction but....why not just Google it
| before posting a lengthy comment based off of what it "sounds
| like"? As the sibling comments link shows, literally the first
| result for googling the term provides a long and detailed
| history of its proponents.
|
| Abs the entire article is written from the perspective of
| someone concerned about sustainability (without thinking lower
| economic growth is a feasible path forward), which makes the
| assumption even more bizarre.
| johmue wrote:
| how tiring to argue over this. "Degrowthing" is a means to an
| end. I don't think many people have a problem with "growth"
| itself just because they somehow religiously hate anything that
| growth. It's just that as is we are not exactly making things
| better and if we do more (without adjusting what we do) then that
| certainly can't suddenly be better for our planet. If we want to
| do less damage we have to reduce the damage that we are doing.
| Certainly selling increasing amounts of "stuff" is not making
| things better. I you can somehow make it so that any flavour of
| growth can be done while reducing the impact, great, go ahead.
|
| In short: It's not that I hate cars, I like cars, I like driving.
| But in order to not break the world we live in we need to make
| fewer cars and drive them less. If you can suddenly make a car
| that does significantly less damage or negative damage then
| PLEASE make it, I will buy it. Growth Yay!
| christkv wrote:
| Buy a second hand car. The cost of making it has already been
| done. Even better a second hand hybrid or electric car. A new
| car no matter how it's made will incur substantial material and
| energy usage.
| illys wrote:
| While I agree on not triggering a new build, I still question
| it:
|
| - When buying second-hand, I still use a share of the car
| lifespan, and it is this lifespan that makes the value of
| building it in the first place.
|
| - I buy it from a person or a system (a leasing company in my
| last car's case) that periodically orders new cars, so I
| participate in making their business model possible by
| providing an output.
|
| - Not everyone can live of second hand stuff: since I brought
| my previous car to its death (near 300.000km), another one
| has to be created somewhere to allow my next buy.
|
| - Up to what mileage and years is it wise to extend the life
| of an old car when new ones burn less per km?
|
| - I also calculated my share of atmospheric CO2 for the life
| of my previous car (6 liters gasoil per 100km over 250.000+
| km), and it is a already a disaster for a single car...
|
| That made me consider an electric car (new since they are
| still very rare second-hand) but only Tesla matches my needs
| and Tesla does not match my financial reach. Indeed the
| others are either hybrid-jokes (with 50km full-electric when
| you have the wind in the back) or city-only electric cars
| (poor recharge network and only 200km range).
|
| My current idea is to reduce kms by adopting more teleworking
| (thanks Covid to push my employer to consider it) and waiting
| for a better offer for electric cars (even new).
| missedthecue wrote:
| Unless you're ordering factory direct, this also applied to
| new cars. The cost of making it has already been done.
| Geee wrote:
| True and false. We should get rid of fake growth, which is
| consuming and producing useless stuff for the sake of preserving
| employment and increasing GDP. This fake growth is the result of
| inflationary monetary policies, which increase unnecessary
| spending and non-efficient investments.
|
| In terms of a strategy game, inflationary economy shifts the
| balance from upgrading your units (more efficient) to just
| producing more with current units.
| imtringued wrote:
| Sure, inflation is fake growth but the system needs endless
| growth so fake growth that employs people is better than real
| growth that abandons them on the streets.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > So the idea here is that we don't need degrowth; instead, we
| can keep raising everyone's standard of living without exhausting
| the planet's resources.
|
| Well, we haven't been able to pull that off. Quite the opposite.
|
| Asia is a dumpster now, their rivers are black stinky waters,
| trash is everywhere, climate is changing at an alarming rate, we
| have lose 60% of all the insect species, oceans are emptying,
| full of micro-plastic and with great current disturbances,
| extreme weather events are occurring more and more and the amazon
| forest is getting eaten.
|
| But sure, tell me how your magical theory matches practice in
| your dream like land.
| courtf wrote:
| It reads like a religious sermon intended to ease the fragile
| consciences of a rapidly dwindling elite, jumping at shadows
| while they barricade themselves ever further into self-
| reinforcing fantasy. Complete and utter detachment from
| reality, complete with an imaginary foe in the form of
| "degrowthers," who supposedly exist and spend their days
| relentlessly banging at the gates of prosperity with intent to
| needlessly sack the city on the hill. Economics as a discipline
| has always been abused to justify the unjustifiable, but here
| it seems to be employed purely to defend the psychological
| safety of the most privileged, who cannot even bear to observe
| the destructive results of their lifestyles from a safe
| distance. The violence committed all around them, in their
| name, and the cries of anguish that result are easily brushed
| aside in service to maintaining the desperate illusion that
| cause and effect don't exist.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| The trick is just what you see in the article: focus on
| country-level data where direct consumption of certain
| resources are going down while GDP goes up, and claim without
| evidence that this is possible for all countries.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| The author cherry picked US, where, BTW, a substantial chunk of
| GDP increase doesn't go to households, and therefore, to
| consumption, but into financial assets [1].
|
| More serious analyses have shown that decoupling is as "magical
| thinking" as de-growth.[2]
|
| I agree that degrowth is a hard pill to digest, and that
| converting our economy to greener alternatives may even fuel
| growth for some time, but I can't see how infinite growth should
| still be our goal, especially considering that human population
| will soon stabilise.
|
| [1] https://russroberts.medium.com/do-the-rich-capture-all-
| the-g...
|
| [2]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...
| dendriti wrote:
| Degrowth is a tool - it is neither good or bad. To dismiss the
| entire concept as "Environmental nutters don't like SUVs and want
| to ban them!" just muddies an already turbid debate.
| croes wrote:
| "rich countries have started to grow while using less and less of
| the planet's most important resources."
|
| Does this include the outsourcing of production to countries in
| asia?
| goodpoint wrote:
| It does not.
| berkes wrote:
| The article is handwavy about this, but states that outsourcing
| is included.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| I think the CO2 graphs are trade-adjusted but those resource
| usage graphs come from USGS so I doubt it takes imports into
| account (especially given imports would include processed
| goods, manufactured parts etc. where estimating the resource
| use would be tricky)
| croes wrote:
| It says trade adjusted, but this seems only to include the
| production. "To calculate consumption-based emissions we need
| to track which goods are traded across the world, and
| whenever a good was imported we need to include all CO2
| emissions that were emitted in the production of that good,
| and vice versa to subtract all CO2 emissions that were
| emitted in the production of goods that were exported."
|
| What about shipping? And the production of the shipping
| vessels? Waste disposal?
| nabla9 wrote:
| Economic growth can continue without limit as long as energy
| intensity and material intensity decreases the same rate.
|
| k% annual economic growth when energy intensity and material
| intensity decrease k% per unit of GDP can go forever.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Only if your starting point was sustainable, unfortunately we
| are well beyond that.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Then growth must be less than (nonrenewable) energy+material
| intensity, but it does not mean there can't be growth.
| XCSme wrote:
| I don't understand the argument, saying that US resource usage
| went down while China resource went up. Isn't this because the
| growth in the US is sustained by the production growth in China?
|
| This doesn't prove that US economy grew while the global
| resources usage went down, just that the resource usage was moved
| offshore.
| dash2 wrote:
| From TFA: " For example, China now produces more CO2 emissions
| than the U.S., the EU, and Japan combined... (And no, this is
| not because of outsourcing, as you can see by looking at the
| trade-adjusted emissions numbers.)" Link to:
| https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
|
| In particular, from that page, consumption-based CO2 emissions
| of the US have gone down since 2007.
| XCSme wrote:
| How can they track the CO2 cost of an imported product? For
| example, I buy many products from Amazon.de, but almost all
| of them are produced in China. Do they account for
| transferring the CO2 emission from the original country? What
| about all that packaging and transportation?
|
| Also, how do they know where all imported items come from?
| Many people buy from Alibaba or other Chinese websites which
| rarely declare the actual items inside delivered packages.
| dash2 wrote:
| Perhaps read the orig research to find answers to these
| questions. My guess is that they measure this at aggregate
| level (using e.g. national statistics on imports versus
| home consumption in each product category). Indeed, that
| would make more sense than trying to track this at
| individual level.
| lifty wrote:
| Growth is an accounting technicality. We can re-define what
| growth means by introducing other metrics in the GDP, like
| population well being, and try as much as possible to de-couple
| it from energy consumption growth. I think energy is essential
| for good living but we can use it more efficiently and we can
| switch to cleaner sources.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >Growth is an accounting technicality.
|
| Dunno how you should measure wealth/growth/etc.
|
| If we all plan on getting wealthy via moving money between
| accounts, buy low/sell high, and surveillance advertising, the
| sky's the limit.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Aligning production/consumption priorities with the need for
| human long-term survival? You are describing degrowth.
|
| The article makes various strawen, starting with "the idea that
| economic growth requires growth in resource use" and
| "Degrowthers have no idea how to combine various resources"
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| That was one reason I was such a big fan of Andrew Yang - a
| minimum amount of consumption guaranteed for everyone, funded
| by increased costs of nonessential consumption, and
| redefinition of what makes a healthy economy so the resulting
| decline in net consumption doesn't ring any alarm bells. From
| an environmentalist standpoint it was an elegantly simple set
| of policies he proposed.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| Everything is an S curve but slowing down an inevitable S curve
| is definitely questionable. The book Growth by Vaclav Smile
| covers this.
| aussiegreenie wrote:
| Maybe, just maybe the measure of "growth" is wrong.
|
| What a load of bullshit.
| orwin wrote:
| One quick points: 1.90$ is arbitrary as a mesure of absolute
| poverty. It is way too low. And actually, the best way of
| mesuring poverty is: %people sleeping without a shelter and
| %people having nutritional deficiency.
|
| Having said that, i think some economist tried to do a
| correlation between adjusted dollar income to lifespan, and found
| that for each cent you make until you earn at least 5$ (adjusted)
| a day in industrialized/globalized countries, your lifespan at 5
| is growing pretty fast. after this, the gains are minimal, so the
| actual limit on poverty should be 5$.
|
| Excluding China, the %age of the world population under 5$
| (adjusted) is diminishing since the 70s, as income from capital
| outperform income from labor faster than the marginal
| productivity increases (AKA: Piketty was wrong in his book
| Capital in the 20th century, capital did not take all
| productivity gains, it took more than that).
|
| I do not have an opinion on degrowth, i hope it won't happen in
| my lifetime (because i'm an hypocrite, but at least i'm not
| hiding between either Singer/Gate optimism or other techno-
| optimism), i'm not actually convinced we will manage to avoid
| one, and i think a controlled one will be better than one that id
| forced upon us.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > 1.90$ is arbitrary as a mesure of absolute poverty
|
| Not only it's arbitrary, but it's not updated on yearly basis,
| even if the cost of life increases by 20% every year.
| dash2 wrote:
| This at the end was a brilliant and very sharp comment:
|
| "At its core, I feel like degrowth's appeal comes from its
| implicit promise to recast genteel North European decline as some
| sort of grandiose world-saving moral quest. "
| david_draco wrote:
| "decline" by what metric?
| dash2 wrote:
| Low growth rates, seems like the most obvious answer.
| cloudfifty wrote:
| There's a fundamental political/ideological divide here that's
| hidden by framing everything in economic jargon.
|
| It's basically like this:
|
| Degrowthers, like e.g. Jason Hickel, generally want a more equal
| society, perhaps even socialistic, and think that the climate
| crisis is a blatant proof that capitalism is unsustainable and
| that to keep trying to save it is basically to prefer go down
| with the ship than to even try to change course.
|
| On the others side, people like Noah Smith are more in the
| status-quo lane that most of all want to save capitalism from
| itself using massive investments in technology etc - but not
| necessarily any systemic changes.
|
| This naturally have caused these two crowds to throw pretty
| heated arguments at each other, and certainly not "unbiased
| objective facts" - if that ever has existed.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Degrowth is bad
|
| Overgrowth is bad
|
| We need a sense of inner balance
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I'm not a degrowther (though I do think we should try to make our
| economy more symbiotic with nature where possible) but a couple
| of issues here stand out to me:
|
| does his argument that Western countries' use of resource has
| started to inversely correlate with QoL improvement hold up in
| the face of those same countries outsourcing almost all
| manufacturing to other countries? It's all well and good that the
| US' use of metals is decreasing, but if that's just because China
| is using the raw materials and shipping the final products over
| then that's no better.
|
| He also makes the argument that as non-industrialised countries
| begin to industrialise, they can just make use of non-material
| goods like we do. Is this not based on the assumption that other
| countries won't want similar standards of living to the US, ie
| car ownership, disposable and consumption goods, etc? We're
| talking about a multiplication of the production of goods.
|
| From a systems standpoint, I think we need to be doing 2 things
| (for CO2 specifically, that's far from the only concern):
| reversing the increase of carbon in the carbon cycle (ie,
| reducing dependence on fossil fuels and sequestering carbon
| artificially if/where safe), and monitoring and increasing the
| bandwidth of the decarbonisation phase of the carbon cycle (soil,
| trees and the ocean playing the main role).
| piokoch wrote:
| Yup, this is exactly the issue here. Lower CO2 emission, etc.
| is lower in developed countries because they have off-shored
| their production. Less developed country (like post-communistic
| Eastern and Central Europe countries) cannot do that, so they
| will the one who would pay for all climatism ideas. And those
| ideas looking good on paper are mostly dumb, as they don't
| really decrease CO2 emission, just move it elsewhere for those
| who are wealthy enough.
|
| Looking and Carbon Tracker is pretty eye opening, if ones check
| how many coal based plants are planned in Asia. Funnily enough,
| Carbon Tracker estimates that 92% of those plants will be
| uneconomic, so, in theory China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and
| Japan want to shoot their own foot for some crazy reason. My
| guess is that Carbon Tracker estimates are not that great...
| ksdale wrote:
| I think he explicitly says in the post that China emits more
| carbon per capita _after_ accounting for carbon offshoring.
| ernopp wrote:
| Yep, accounting for carbon offshoring lowers the difference
| (US emissions gain 7% if you count consumption not just
| production, and China's lose 14%) but it still holds that
| China emits more per capita.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
| imtringued wrote:
| I'm not a degrowther either but reading their papers is quite
| interesting because from a first glance nobody will champion
| degrowth as a movement. Yet at the same time "growthers" are
| doomed to adopt the policy suggestions of "degrowthers". Why?
| Because all they did is imagine a sustainable future. Every
| time growth hits a sustainability cliff, politicians are forced
| to adopt one more degrowth policy.
|
| https://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Kallis_2012_...
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Unless the Forced Green Growth is redistributive in nature the
| policy Noah is pining for will actually result in the exact same
| outcome for the poor as degrowth. This is obvious when you
| consider who owns Teslas cars or who has transformed their roofs
| to solar.
| roenxi wrote:
| Degrowthers have a third argument that is a bit stronger than the
| two Noah debunks:
|
| The charts showing that the US is consuming less resources as
| time goes on suggests the US is _not growing_. The financial
| shenanigans have decoupled the official statistics from reality.
|
| There is a reason everyone is getting all stressed and politics
| are getting tenser - once growth stops, politics becomes about
| how to divide up a fixed pie.
| tuatoru wrote:
| There is also, and mainly, the "hedonic adjustment" that is
| made in computing GDP - the price of computing devices, for
| instance is arbitrarily increased to reflect their increased
| "power", and this is taken to mean that their value to
| consumers is increased by the same amount.
|
| This year's phone is ten times as "powerful" as one from five
| years ago, therefore we multiply phone sales by ten.
|
| The same reasoning applies with cars, ignoring the fact that
| it's now nearly impossible to buy a car without power windows,
| power steering, automatic transmission, anti-lock braking, etc.
| jaggs wrote:
| I really enjoy reading this type of article because it
| automatically assumes that we are facing a choice of action. As
| if nature is going to just politely sit around and wait for us to
| discuss and plan optimised futures which are politically
| acceptable. Unfortunately, judging by the current massive ramp up
| in catastrophic climate impacts, this is unlikely to be an
| option. Instead it looks as though we'll be spending a
| considerable amount of time fire-fighting (pun intended) with
| increasingly desperate intensity until the whole stack of cards
| collapses on itself. Such a shame that we let things get to this
| state.
| mlang23 wrote:
| This is nothing new, its just being dressed up fresh and pushed
| by media. Where I live, the hole in the ozone layer and the
| imminent end of fossile energy sources was taught in school
| already 30 to 40 years ago. Everyone and their dog knew how bad
| we were and are treating the environment. Heck, it took two
| decades to force the leather-maker in our village to stop
| completely polluting our river. Everyone knew. But the industry
| was busy making money, and making the common people dependant
| on the shiny and new offerings of the consumerism culture.
| People stopped to do small-scale farming because it was much
| cheaper to go to the grocery-store and buy stuff.
|
| And now that the industry, mostly managers, have made a
| shitload of money, the common man is supposed to fix it all up.
|
| Sorry. I know why you think it is important. However, I am too
| old to believe this system can be fixed. We are doomed, and its
| about time we start to accept that. We've trained people to
| consume and be dependant on supply chains. We are not going to
| unlearn this as a society. A few will deprive themselves of
| things they could consume. But these people are not going to be
| significant. The rest is going to go on like they learnt in
| childhood.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Spot on. Every time we hear that some environmental goal is
| "not possible" or "not financially viable" we have to keep in
| mind that the environment collapse will serve us the bill.
|
| [Poor] people will die by the millions, again and again until
| we go extinct or go back to a sustainable lifestyle.
|
| "degrowth's appeal comes from its implicit promise to recast
| genteel North European decline as some sort of grandiose world-
| saving moral quest."
|
| Aka: "I don't want to give up my SUV. Let the collapse happen."
| smolder wrote:
| This is a bit of a misleading title and article. The author
| claims to be against degrowth but then essentially makes
| arguments for it, with the caveat that we shouldn't reduce
| production, but only reduce consumption. That's despite the fact
| that degrowth is primarily about reducing resource use, not
| really about reducing other measures of productivity. Degrowth
| isn't about avoiding _all_ work, reducing the production of solar
| panels, or stopping the building of passive housing, it 's about
| cutting wasteful activity in favor of sustainable activity, much
| like the article advocates for. This requires significant central
| planning, which they both say is a non-starter and then advocate
| for in the form of forced green development. Ultimately, I don't
| see a big difference between their proposed way forward and that
| of the "degrowthers". It could even be regarded as a treatise on
| what degrowth could look like in practice.
|
| Regardless of what mechanism we might invent for styling our
| growth oriented economy into a consumption reducing one, a big
| intervention is required, and we do need to intervene to avoid
| slamming (on ecological timescales) into malthusian limits in the
| ugliest way.
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