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People are realizing that degrowth is bad

anemoiac 5y ago
Some may be, but others are realizing the opposite.
- samhw 5y ago
  FWIW, this view is normally referred to as [cornucopianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian 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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        Assuming we need nothing but space to exist in, the surface area of the earth is finite. Expand that by a few km up and down, and humans still have a finite amount of space to live within. If we're allowed colonization of space, we can only travel at a finite speed. Humans can overtake a finite radius in a year, resulting in a cubic rate of growth in volume. Exponential growth is ultimately limited by the finite speed of light and dimensionality of our universe.
- amcvitty 5y ago
  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
  - hannob 5y ago
    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/20200507_Hydrogen-Powered-Aviation-report.pdf 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.)
  - dariosalvi78 5y ago
    here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901120304342 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...
FooHentai 5y ago
>"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 5y ago
  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
Certhas 5y ago
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.
- mmarq 5y ago
  > 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.
  - boudin 5y ago
    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.
    - toto444 5y ago
ricardobeat 5y ago
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.
- dash2 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
rayiner 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    It’s likely large cohorts of those folks are going to starve to death from climate change related crop failures.
    - baxtr 5y ago
      It's really really difficult to estimate the probability of something like that if it never happened before. Compare this to: in the next 200 years there will be a 9.0 earthquake in San Francisco with a probability of 99%. Or a pandemic...
- berkes 5y ago
  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
  - 5y ago
johmue 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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).
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
> 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.
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  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.
- courtf 5y ago
  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.
dendriti 5y ago
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 5y ago
"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?
- berkes 5y ago
  The article is handwavy about this, but states that outsourcing is included.
  - croes 5y ago
    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?
  - alexgmcm 5y ago
    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)
- goodpoint 5y ago
  It does not.
XCSme 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 In particular, from that page, consumption-based CO2 emissions of the US have gone down since 2007.
  - XCSme 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
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.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  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"
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  >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.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  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.
orwin 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  "decline" by what metric?
  - dash2 5y ago
    Low growth rates, seems like the most obvious answer.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Europe's working age population is declining, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future unless old, retired Europeans undergo a major change in attitudes to immigration. IIRC the decline is about 1.5% per year and it is forecast to increase considerably. The same has been true of Japan for two decades,South Korea for one decade, and China's working age population peaked in 2015. China is running out of people in its rural areas that it can draw on for its factories. The USA, Canada, and Australia are propped up by immigrants. (Work, GDP, is done by working age people. This is not always obvious to economists.)
beaconstudios 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I think he explicitly says in the post that China emits more carbon per capita after accounting for carbon offshoring.
petermcneeley 5y ago
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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    > 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. > 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. Well, good news! We passed legislation to limit ozone-depleting chemicals, and now the ozone hole has stopped getting worse and is now healing: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452 So we are not doomed, and it's good to not accept that. We CAN make changes and fix things. And it doesn't require getting rid of refrigeration (or energy), it just requires different refrigerants (or sources of energy).
rsp1984 5y ago
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.
Ambolia 5y ago
"we can raise human living standards without exhausting the planet." How much of that has been achieved by manufacturing everything in China?
bertil 5y ago
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.
SiempreViernes 5y ago
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 5y ago
  It's not a slur or epithet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth#Origins_of_the_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth#Origins_of_the_moveme...
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > 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.
Geee 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
nabla9 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Only if your starting point was sustainable, unfortunately we are well beyond that.
  - nabla9 5y ago
    Then growth must be less than (nonrenewable) energy+material intensity, but it does not mean there can't be growth.
- heisenzombie 5y ago
  So the amount of matter and energy exchanged in the average economic transaction tends toward zero?
smolder 5y ago
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.
dariosalvi78 5y ago
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-gains-from-economic-growth-c96d93101f9c https://russroberts.medium.com/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-g... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901120304342 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...
cloudfifty 5y ago
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 5y ago
Degrowth is bad Overgrowth is bad We need a sense of inner balance
dalbasal 5y ago
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.
rogerkirkness 5y ago
Everything is an S curve but slowing down an inevitable S curve is definitely questionable. The book Growth by Vaclav Smile covers this.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Smil's books (no final 'e' BTW) are excellent. His Energy and Civilization (and the earlier (Energy in World History), demonstrate the phenomenal role of energy in bringing about modernity. Making the modern world : materials and dematerialization looks at the material side. https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Asmil%2C+vaclav https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Asmil%2C+vaclav
aussiegreenie 5y ago
Maybe, just maybe the measure of "growth" is wrong. What a load of bullshit.
dnautics 5y ago
I think Noah is talking past the degrowther point: the current highly leveraged, debt-driven system economic system requires growth or else it collapses (total nominal value must be exponential, or else you get depressions). I think degrowthers would be fine if there was "natural growth" due to realized gains in efficiency, but forcing a system to "grow or else" has lots of bad consequences, including: overemphasizing consumerism over conservation, stealing from the poor to give to the rich, malinvestment at a societal scale by forcing retirees to gamble in the stock casino, cronyism and corruption at the source of the money spigot, etc.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I just want to say I'm glad to see someone talking about economic growth and distinguishing between economic growth (what you call "natural growth") and the push for stock prices to go up ad infinitum. Too many people that get involved in discussions like this don't seem to understand that distinction, and I think you're on the money with regard to the effects of the latter.

Some may be, but others are realizing the opposite.

samhw 5y ago
FWIW, this view is normally referred to as [cornucopianism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      Assuming we need nothing but space to exist in, the surface area of the earth is finite. Expand that by a few km up and down, and humans still have a finite amount of space to live within. If we're allowed colonization of space, we can only travel at a finite speed. Humans can overtake a finite radius in a year, resulting in a cubic rate of growth in volume. Exponential growth is ultimately limited by the finite speed of light and dimensionality of our universe.
amcvitty 5y ago
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
- hannob 5y ago
  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/20200507_Hydrogen-Powered-Aviation-report.pdf 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.)
- dariosalvi78 5y ago
  here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901120304342 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...

>"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 5y ago
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

Certhas 5y ago

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.

mmarq 5y ago
> 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.
- boudin 5y ago
  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.
  - toto444 5y ago

ricardobeat 5y ago

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.

dash2 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago

rayiner 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  It’s likely large cohorts of those folks are going to starve to death from climate change related crop failures.
  - baxtr 5y ago
    It's really really difficult to estimate the probability of something like that if it never happened before. Compare this to: in the next 200 years there will be a 9.0 earthquake in San Francisco with a probability of 99%. Or a pandemic...
berkes 5y ago
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
- 5y ago

johmue 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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).

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

> 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.

cool_dude85 5y ago
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.
courtf 5y ago
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.

dendriti 5y ago

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 5y ago

"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?

berkes 5y ago
The article is handwavy about this, but states that outsourcing is included.
- croes 5y ago
  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?
- alexgmcm 5y ago
  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)
goodpoint 5y ago
It does not.

XCSme 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 In particular, from that page, consumption-based CO2 emissions of the US have gone down since 2007.
- XCSme 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago

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.

goodpoint 5y ago
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"
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
>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.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
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.

orwin 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago

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 5y ago
"decline" by what metric?
- dash2 5y ago
  Low growth rates, seems like the most obvious answer.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Europe's working age population is declining, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future unless old, retired Europeans undergo a major change in attitudes to immigration. IIRC the decline is about 1.5% per year and it is forecast to increase considerably. The same has been true of Japan for two decades,South Korea for one decade, and China's working age population peaked in 2015. China is running out of people in its rural areas that it can draw on for its factories. The USA, Canada, and Australia are propped up by immigrants. (Work, GDP, is done by working age people. This is not always obvious to economists.)

beaconstudios 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I think he explicitly says in the post that China emits more carbon per capita after accounting for carbon offshoring.

petermcneeley 5y ago

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 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  > 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. > 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. Well, good news! We passed legislation to limit ozone-depleting chemicals, and now the ozone hole has stopped getting worse and is now healing: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046452 So we are not doomed, and it's good to not accept that. We CAN make changes and fix things. And it doesn't require getting rid of refrigeration (or energy), it just requires different refrigerants (or sources of energy).

rsp1984 5y ago

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.

Ambolia 5y ago

"we can raise human living standards without exhausting the planet." How much of that has been achieved by manufacturing everything in China?

bertil 5y ago

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.

SiempreViernes 5y ago

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 5y ago
It's not a slur or epithet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth#Origins_of_the_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth#Origins_of_the_moveme...
wutbrodo 5y ago
> 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.

Geee 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

nabla9 5y ago

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 5y ago
Only if your starting point was sustainable, unfortunately we are well beyond that.
- nabla9 5y ago
  Then growth must be less than (nonrenewable) energy+material intensity, but it does not mean there can't be growth.
heisenzombie 5y ago
So the amount of matter and energy exchanged in the average economic transaction tends toward zero?

smolder 5y ago

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.

dariosalvi78 5y ago

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-gains-from-economic-growth-c96d93101f9c https://russroberts.medium.com/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-g... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901120304342 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14629...

cloudfifty 5y ago

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 5y ago

Degrowth is bad Overgrowth is bad We need a sense of inner balance

dalbasal 5y ago

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.

rogerkirkness 5y ago

Everything is an S curve but slowing down an inevitable S curve is definitely questionable. The book Growth by Vaclav Smile covers this.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Smil's books (no final 'e' BTW) are excellent. His Energy and Civilization (and the earlier (Energy in World History), demonstrate the phenomenal role of energy in bringing about modernity. Making the modern world : materials and dematerialization looks at the material side. https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Asmil%2C+vaclav https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Asmil%2C+vaclav

aussiegreenie 5y ago

Maybe, just maybe the measure of "growth" is wrong. What a load of bullshit.

dnautics 5y ago

I think Noah is talking past the degrowther point: the current highly leveraged, debt-driven system economic system requires growth or else it collapses (total nominal value must be exponential, or else you get depressions). I think degrowthers would be fine if there was "natural growth" due to realized gains in efficiency, but forcing a system to "grow or else" has lots of bad consequences, including: overemphasizing consumerism over conservation, stealing from the poor to give to the rich, malinvestment at a societal scale by forcing retirees to gamble in the stock casino, cronyism and corruption at the source of the money spigot, etc.

betwixthewires 5y ago
I just want to say I'm glad to see someone talking about economic growth and distinguishing between economic growth (what you call "natural growth") and the push for stock prices to go up ad infinitum. Too many people that get involved in discussions like this don't seem to understand that distinction, and I think you're on the money with regard to the effects of the latter.