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Fundamentally exponential growth is not sustainable in the long run. But more importantly I see some reasonable degrowth arguments as advocating an end to cons

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
    This is discussed at length here : https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... and in the comments.
  - mmarq 5y ago
    The very fact that my iPhone is lighter than my father’s calculator, should say something at least about raw materials.
    - i_am_proteus 5y ago
      Similarly, my bicycle is lighter than my father's horse. Mass alone does not tell the whole story.
      - mmarq 5y ago
        And it also requires much less energy and maintenance to be produced and operated. Growth.
      - taneq 5y ago
        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.
        boudin 5y ago
        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 ?
        i_am_proteus 5y ago
        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.
- Tade0 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.
- whiteboardr 5y ago
  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 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/plenitude
- agent008t 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    > 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.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
  > 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/ https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
- jccodez 5y ago
  i love my headphone jack on my 6s, its very innovative. talk about ioc.
- dariosalvi78 5y ago
  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?
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
boxed 5y ago
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!
- shele 5y ago
  There is this S-curve of the amount of newly starting S-curves where we are going to see a slowdown...
- imtringued 5y ago
  I assume it means letting the economy run at the highest sustainable level, rather than insisting on a certain velocity of progress.
piokoch 5y ago
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 5y ago
> 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.
- Certhas 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    economic aka satisfying other people's desires but not my own
    - Certhas 5y ago
pembrook 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  > 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.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Which societies are those? Feudal ones where the nobles are the only ones consuming and everyone else is subsisting? Or the ancient ones like Rome where there is a large amount of slave labor?
Applejinx 5y ago
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'.
Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
Link to the ol' Economist meets a Physicist conversation: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... "The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years."
hoseja 5y ago
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.

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
  This is discussed at length here : https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... and in the comments.
- mmarq 5y ago
  The very fact that my iPhone is lighter than my father’s calculator, should say something at least about raw materials.
  - i_am_proteus 5y ago
    Similarly, my bicycle is lighter than my father's horse. Mass alone does not tell the whole story.
    - mmarq 5y ago
      And it also requires much less energy and maintenance to be produced and operated. Growth.
    - taneq 5y ago
      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.
      - boudin 5y ago
        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 ?
      - i_am_proteus 5y ago
        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.
Tade0 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.
whiteboardr 5y ago
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 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/plenitude
agent008t 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  > 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.
Applejinx 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
> 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/ https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
jccodez 5y ago
i love my headphone jack on my 6s, its very innovative. talk about ioc.
dariosalvi78 5y ago
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?
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

boxed 5y ago

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!

shele 5y ago
There is this S-curve of the amount of newly starting S-curves where we are going to see a slowdown...
imtringued 5y ago
I assume it means letting the economy run at the highest sustainable level, rather than insisting on a certain velocity of progress.

piokoch 5y ago

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 5y ago

> 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.

Certhas 5y ago
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 5y ago
  economic aka satisfying other people's desires but not my own
  - Certhas 5y ago

pembrook 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
> 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.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Which societies are those? Feudal ones where the nobles are the only ones consuming and everyone else is subsisting? Or the ancient ones like Rome where there is a large amount of slave labor?

Applejinx 5y ago

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'.

Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago

Link to the ol' Economist meets a Physicist conversation: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... "The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years."

hoseja 5y ago

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.