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Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean
- heydenberk 4y agoAs an environmentalist, I have plenty of friends who are interested in degrowth, or even actively promote the concept. Curiously, however, none of them are interested in moving to one of the many rural counties in the US currently undergoing degrowth.
- soldehierro 4y agoCan you provide an example of one of these counties and why you consider they are undergoing "degrowth"? Degrowth is usually conceptualized as an intentional process, rather than economic decline.
- dash2 4y agoThat sounds suspiciously like "The reality of falling income sucks, but my imagination of how it might be is awesome."
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoHalf of global GDP growth is simply population growth. You could be in place like Japan where you have lower population, but still productivity growth such that incomes don't decline. You could also be a place like pretty much everywhere in the world before the Industrial Revolution when the Malthusian Trap was a popular thought - and your population grows but productivity declines. GDP goes up, but you get more miserable. Not great. I don't think anyone imagines falling incomes as awesome. Additionally, even if productivity and population decline - the Fed can always devalue money such that your income goes up - even if your situation is getting materially worse. I don't know why people obsess over population growth. We already don't want to invest in the people we have. Productivity growth should be the thing we all want. There's not a lot of people that are like: Damn those tractors that stole all the agricultural jobs! For the most part - we're happy 90% of the population doesn't have to work in agriculture.
- Gibbon1 4y ago> Half of global GDP growth is simply population growth. If you double some poor saps commute that grows GDP too.
- sokoloff 4y agoDoubling someone’s commute diverts more of their money into commuting expenses, which removes that exact amount of money from some other category of spending. If diverted from savings, this grows current GDP. If diverted from some other category of spending, it’s likely neutral. (If diverted from higher velocity domestic spending into the importation of energy [and exporting of cash], it could even shrink GDP.) Breaking windows doesn’t generally grow GDP.
- antifa 4y agoI think of it more like "what if all the effort resources put in to things like making funkopops and microtransaction heavy child addiction simulations for mobile phones were used for good things. What if we weren't all forced to drive into the officeif it wasn't truly necessary." The neoliberal version is basically "cost of living goes up, manufacturing of instant waste goes up, the common man gets nothing."
- ardit33 4y agoDegrowth with declining economy means Detroit. Or many other rust belt cities. Degrowth without economic decline, means Carmel By the Sea in Ca, or those small towns in the Key West where only the rich can afford to live. You can put many towns in the SF Bay Area which have actively stalled any growth. They have one thing in common: they are super expensive.
- JSavageOne 4y agoRural areas in the U.S are unwalkable (not just rural areas, but most of the U.S), not to mention probably devoid of people and community. People value community and walkability. Also degrowth doesn't imply living in rural areas.
- h2odragon 4y agoRural areas are much more walkable; just stay off the roads. Some places you might want to watch for coyote.
- montefischer 4y agoFor those interested, Ivan Illich wrote a series of books criticizing the modern approach to healthcare, education, transportation, gender etc. from a perspective that might be called "degrowth" today. A great introductory essay on Illich (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of-the-best-on-ivan-illich/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of...) was published recently in American Affairs. In my experience, the power of a single personality passionately committed to an idea is usually a better introduction than an academic survey article. Illich was a radical and none of his ideas come with batteries included, but exploring his ideaspace was an invigorating experience for someone who had hitherto only pitched his tent in the libertarian technocapitalist suburbs of the mind.
- specialist 4y agoThanks. Added Illich to my reading list (backlog). I generally like American Affairs. Though I'm exhausted by the left vs right slap fight. IMHO, anarchism and liberation theology are intrinsically outside of left vs right, liberal vs reactionary; they reject those dichotomies, and are better understood as criticism of the establishment and power structures. In other words, to an anarchist, there's little difference between the political philosophies of Liberal and Conservative, little difference between Catholics and Protestant. Rather, it's about speaking up for the weakest. Skim reading Illich's wiki, I would agree that he's a "radical", and that his contemporarous critics mislabeling him a "reactionary" is kinda proving his point. Today, you see the same kind of pushback against David Graeber and David Wengrow.
- ggpsv 4y agoI'm halfway through "The Dawn of Everything" to understand the reference on heterodoxy associated to Graeber and Wengrow. What sort of pushback are you seeing?
- specialist 4y agoOne example was Brad de Long trolling Graeber; nitpicking over errata while ignoring Debt's thesis and open questions.
- ardit33 4y agoDumb paper. What the author calls degrowth, it is living in a more primitive and old fashion way. Neighbor Albania and Italy have this problem as well. There are plenty of villages where people live like it is still the early 1900s. The author forgot to mention that they have one thing in common: all this villages it is mostly older people that live there, with few young ones left, mostly doing agriculture related work. Most young people have left these villages due to the lack of economic opportunities. So, this thing called ‘degrowth’ is just economic stagnation. Also, you don’t have to travel in Europe to see this. We have the Amish folks here, and that’s what a successful ultimate degrowth is. In Southern Europe it is mostly forced due to economic conditions. There are a lot of left wing radicals that advocate for ‘degrowth’, but that ultimately is advocating for poverty, and bring the US back to the 70s. The libertarian view of degrowth, is to leave like a ‘homestead farm’, while the left version is to live in some giant communist coop where people consume only what’s needed, but this time it is with the ‘old fashion” twist. 52 failed attempt at communism should have given them a clue that it doesn’t work. Degrowth = poverty for the masses, while still few elites enjoy and live a lavish life.
- softcactus 4y agoI'd like to offer a differing perspective. Let's say you have a company that makes shoes. You attract investors by growing steadily at 3% a year. At some point, the market becomes crowded or monopolized such that you can no longer grow at 3% by attracting new customers or creating new products. So you start to increase profit by reducing your margins-- using worse materials and worse construction methods. You use planned obsolescence to increase the number of times customers have to buy your products. Ask yourself, once this inflection point is reached and quality is no longer increasing, does a growth economy make sense? At this terminal stage of economic growth there is an increase in negative externalities in the pursuit of ever-diminishing profits. Much more waste as the shoes are built with worse and worse materials. More exploitation in an attempt to reduce labor costs. Do you think that over the last 30 years, shoes have increased in quality relative to the profit margins of these companies? If the answer is no, then it means we need to figure out a way to deal with terminal-stage industries. Sure, there are people advocating for everyone to go live like the Amish, but to me degrowth means that if an industry can no longer achieve growth through innovation or increases in productivity, we should acknowledge that that industry has peaked, and not try to squeeze every last dollar out of it through exploitation or waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
- paganel 4y agoDe-growth means “increased poverty” for most of us, I really hate this double-speak. Yes, I know this continued growth thing is not sustainable in the medium to long term (and saying that until very recently meant you were branded as a stupid Malthusian, still does, but less so), but I think we should stop f.ing around when it comes to naming stuff and call it what it is: we need less stuff to consume for the ecosystem to remain stable (or so we currently think), which means more poverty for the majority of us.
- jaqalopes 4y agoWith inflation and increasing inequality I'm already living a more "impoverished" life than my parents when they were my age, yet economic growth has been out of control. I don't think your vision of "most of us" is at all connected to reality.
- paganel 4y agoThe de-growth is mostly targeted at the up and coming demographic behemoths of India and China, maybe also Africa as a whole. It’s the West’s way of telling them: “you can’t be like us, that would be bad for the planet”. Of course, many low-middle-class to working class people from the West will also fall on the wrong side of all this, but in a way they already have started experiencing it, like you mention (you can look at existing NIMBY policies in the West as de facto de-growth policies that directly and negatively affect those socio-economic chunks of the populace).
- mbustamanter 4y agoMost recently Latin America too, as academics from the UK, France and Spain want to make us believe.
- ggpsv 4y agoI'm sorry but this is a misinterpretation of the degrowth thesis. The proponents behind degrowth (i.e Hickels, Kallis) are constantly correcting this misinterpretation. Degrowth stipulates that the global south actually needs to continue to grow to reach important indicators associated to the quality of life of their citizens. According to them, the actual "degrowth" has to happen in the global north where economies are over-saturated [0]: > We live in a world where poverty remains and those with unmet needs require more resources to satisfy them. We also live in an ecologically-constrained world struggling to cut emissions as fast as possible. In that context, by reducing consumption in the global North (and more generally for all of those who are over-consuming), one could free some of these resources for the people who need it the most. Ensuring basic needs and well-being for all necessarily implies limiting consumption in high-income regions and wealthy households in order to enable resource-poor countries and households to reach decent standards of living. In other words, degrowth in the global North is a prerequisite for sustainable development in the global South. [0]: https://timotheeparrique.com/sufficiency-means-degrowth/ https://timotheeparrique.com/sufficiency-means-degrowth/
- caffeine 4y ago
- ham-sandwich 4y agoThis is the best take. You can see why universities continue to exist - the overwhelmingly wealthy people that hang out here lap it up. This is great West Coast dinner party discussion, while drinking an $80 bottle of wine. Go to the rural South if you want to see this phenomenon in person. It’s not romantic.
- enviclash 4y agoSmall islands are always great petri dishes for this type of thought or of actual socio-economic experiments. The limits of the system are clear and the lack of relevant alternatives could make things work, still continents do not have these advantages, and pose greater barriers to socio-ecological innovations.
- throw93232 4y ago》Drawing on fieldwork and ethnography from Ikaria and Gavdos Ikaria is full of old pensioners that recieve money from mainland. It is unsustainable model, is fueled by deficit spending and "growth" mentality, author critisizes.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoYeah, it reads pretty oddly. As if the author is purposefully ignoring the actual basis of economies.
- dimitar 4y agoThe whole idea of degrowth is based on a strawman argument of what economic growth is and what mainstream economic theories describe as its causes. Worse yet, it attacks things that are useful for defeating challenges like hunger, global warming and pollution and offers no actual help for those causes. It is throwing the baby with the bathwater. The strawman equates growth with additional non-renewable resource extraction + increased consumerism. Mainstream theories explain growth with increases productivity - producing more with the same inputs. Let's examine a thought experiment - the world reverts to living as in the 18th century. It will be mass starvation as we will not be able to produce enough food and the surving people will clear the forests for firewood and land, exhaust the soils with primitive agriculture. Both humans and the environment will be much worse off.
- oblak 4y agoWith all due respect, it looks to me that you're the one presenting a straw man argument here. What's the point of (economic) growth if not to meet the demands of the consumerism? You gotta keep consuming stuff to fill the void that consuming stuff creates. There's nothing wrong with consuming less. Look at all the fat fucks on the streets. The needlessly big, loud, and fuel hungry vehicles. It's bad for all us.
- dimitar 4y agoSo fattening food and vehicles are the only possible goods and services? How about living longer and healthier? Education, preserving the environment, care for the sick, young and elderly, all of that can be much improved and if you have a bigger GDP.
- mattcwilson 4y agoThere can be cost bloat in all of those services, and if additional spend in those areas nets marginal or negligible additional outcomes, they might be “overgrown.” There’s an analogy here to code bloat and minimum viable product, I’m sure. You may find this interesting? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
- libertine 4y agoThe problem of these concepts for me is that foreigners can come in while playing by other rules. Ends up pushing people out.