3 ms·

Growth is overrated. We sorely need to have financial architectures of capital that don't depend on the assumption of endless growth.

chii 4y ago
If there's no growth, how will the people who are currently poorer become richer?
- elzbardico 4y ago
  By having wealthier people become poorer by paying taxes. There's no mystery here. We've been making rich people wealthier with the middle-class taxes (including inflation, the most regressive tax ever invented), feeding all kinds of corporate welfare, including, but not limited to, the military industrial complex. It is about time we start thinking about taxing the rich. Alternatively, the rich can keep hoarding their money, pretending not to notice that their first-world economies are becoming increasingly similar to Somalia and that they will soon need armored vehicles and fortified condos to protect themselves from the desperate and famished masses.
  - moistly 4y ago
    But you see, they already don’t live among us, not really. They already live in private compounds with security, and private resorts with security, and gated estate communities with, you guessed it, security. We’re hardly likely to dine in the same restaurants as them, attend the same private screenings and concerts, vacation on the same beaches and slopes. They may make public appearances, but so do the wealthiest in any dysfunctional country: they do not live with us.
  - iqkznnft 4y ago
    I like it how it is now, and I'll fight people like you to keep it that way.
    - imtringued 4y ago
    - elzbardico 4y ago
      I also like how it is now, I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and now I even can live in a very cheap place. And I once thought like you. But then, one day, I figured out that I was in the minority. And I have a choice: I can open the purse now or have it opened by force by the majority someday. Yes, maybe they would end up worse in the end. But I would be dead—a terrible score by my standards. My goal is to avoid a revolution. People like you merrily stride towards it by being wholly insensible and fighting people like me. Ask the Romanoff royal family if they don't think they should have been less stubborn in hindsight.
      - chii 4y ago
        > I can open the purse now or have it opened by force by the majority someday. why are these the only possible choices? Why can't the third option, one where the poor also get richer (compared to their poorer past) through growth, and improvements in tech? because that was what has been happening for the past several hundred years, and a lot of it in the past 100 years. Some people didn't get ahead as far as some others - but the poor of today are still better off than poor of several centuries ago. if you look at countries that have had revolutions that stripped the rich of their wealth, how have they fared today?
        elzbardico 4y ago
        Well, we have been growing like crazy the last 20 years. But unless you live under a rock, it is clear that now the bulk of the gains are not going to workers. Yes, they did in the past, but the tendency now is of ever increasing wealth and income concentration. Something changed. your thinking worked for a world that is left in the past, now we need other answers.
- over_bridge 4y ago
  Wealth redistribution. There's already plenty for everyone, it's just distributed in a way where the top class of people has cash to burn on bored apes, yachts and thousand dollar white tee shirts. The poor work for scraps. We needed growth when no one had anything. That's not the world we live in today. Let's start recirculating that money instead of leaving it in people's treasure hoards. Edit: I also want to say that growth will never lift all of the poor out of poverty. Poor is a relative term. If all prices target the median earner say, they will keep rising faster than the lowest incomes do and the poor will never catch up. We need a smaller spread of wealth to keep things affordable.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    I have read some Marxist books and everytime I read their proposed solutions I shake my head. How can anyone be so misguided? Of course, the reason why Marx is popular is that his criticism of capitalism is actually very close to the truth. Capitalists produce for the sake of profit. No profit means no production. Market economies try to optimize profits to 0%. Thus, capitalists will simply stop producing well before the market is being served. This is why farmers need subsidies from the government. They would try to keep a small fraction of the population under the threat of starvation to maintain high enough profits to justify private production. So poverty is actually considered a non problem. Anyone who has to go without their basic needs being met is there to increase profitability and justify further growth. Now, one should ask oneself. If markets exist to eliminate profits where are these hyper competitive industries that threaten to eat up/shut down your corporation if your profit is too low? Why doesn't their profit shrink to zero as one would expect? As mentioned above, extortion is a very easy way to maintain high profits. No entirely voluntary economic transaction can compete with extortion in terms of profit. So any capitalist economy with too many products will actually get worse than if there was a slight shortage of products. This is because the entire economy will shift towards extortive industries. Every industry will adopt a certain amount nastiness to stay competitive. Industries will try to consolidate into monopolies because they allow a greater degree of extortion.
- imtringued 4y ago
  A lot of the growth isn't meant for poor people. When people talk about endless growth being bad it usually means that there is no upper bound for wealth of a single person, leading to huge wealth concentration. What if the frontier was bounded by some multiple of the poorest person? Imagine capping salaries and capital gains to 1000 times the minimum wage. Bounded growth creates an incentive to help the bottom first.
- neilwilson 4y ago
  By having a class of people who don't believe in growth who want the job of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. That's why they don't believe in growth - it gives them a job where they can act morally superior while skimming a chunk of output for themselves. It's the middle class equivalent of giving a man a fish, rather than teaching them to fish. Productive growth, of course, is doing more with less, and just getting things to cycle faster. Nobody thinks the carbon cycle is unsustainable, however if you can find a way to get plants to do that cycle twice in a year rather than once you've doubled growth. That's where future growth needs to come from. Improvements in the speed of turn amongst sustainable production cycles.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Growth cannot be infinite. Future growth is never guaranteed, and less likely the more unsustainable the processes.
    - neilwilson 4y ago
      Well of course growth can’t be infinite. The Sun will explode in about five billion years.
neilwilson 4y ago
Growth is just doing more with less and is limited only by human ingenuity and getting the power of the sun and other nuclear forces to move in a different direction. You can create growth simply by moving financial numbers between computers faster. Or changing the numbers. Growth, like inflation is one of those humpty dumpty words that means different things to different people.

chii 4y ago

If there's no growth, how will the people who are currently poorer become richer?

elzbardico 4y ago
By having wealthier people become poorer by paying taxes. There's no mystery here. We've been making rich people wealthier with the middle-class taxes (including inflation, the most regressive tax ever invented), feeding all kinds of corporate welfare, including, but not limited to, the military industrial complex. It is about time we start thinking about taxing the rich. Alternatively, the rich can keep hoarding their money, pretending not to notice that their first-world economies are becoming increasingly similar to Somalia and that they will soon need armored vehicles and fortified condos to protect themselves from the desperate and famished masses.
- moistly 4y ago
  But you see, they already don’t live among us, not really. They already live in private compounds with security, and private resorts with security, and gated estate communities with, you guessed it, security. We’re hardly likely to dine in the same restaurants as them, attend the same private screenings and concerts, vacation on the same beaches and slopes. They may make public appearances, but so do the wealthiest in any dysfunctional country: they do not live with us.
- iqkznnft 4y ago
  I like it how it is now, and I'll fight people like you to keep it that way.
  - imtringued 4y ago
  - elzbardico 4y ago
    I also like how it is now, I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and now I even can live in a very cheap place. And I once thought like you. But then, one day, I figured out that I was in the minority. And I have a choice: I can open the purse now or have it opened by force by the majority someday. Yes, maybe they would end up worse in the end. But I would be dead—a terrible score by my standards. My goal is to avoid a revolution. People like you merrily stride towards it by being wholly insensible and fighting people like me. Ask the Romanoff royal family if they don't think they should have been less stubborn in hindsight.
    - chii 4y ago
      > I can open the purse now or have it opened by force by the majority someday. why are these the only possible choices? Why can't the third option, one where the poor also get richer (compared to their poorer past) through growth, and improvements in tech? because that was what has been happening for the past several hundred years, and a lot of it in the past 100 years. Some people didn't get ahead as far as some others - but the poor of today are still better off than poor of several centuries ago. if you look at countries that have had revolutions that stripped the rich of their wealth, how have they fared today?
      - elzbardico 4y ago
        Well, we have been growing like crazy the last 20 years. But unless you live under a rock, it is clear that now the bulk of the gains are not going to workers. Yes, they did in the past, but the tendency now is of ever increasing wealth and income concentration. Something changed. your thinking worked for a world that is left in the past, now we need other answers.
over_bridge 4y ago
Wealth redistribution. There's already plenty for everyone, it's just distributed in a way where the top class of people has cash to burn on bored apes, yachts and thousand dollar white tee shirts. The poor work for scraps. We needed growth when no one had anything. That's not the world we live in today. Let's start recirculating that money instead of leaving it in people's treasure hoards. Edit: I also want to say that growth will never lift all of the poor out of poverty. Poor is a relative term. If all prices target the median earner say, they will keep rising faster than the lowest incomes do and the poor will never catch up. We need a smaller spread of wealth to keep things affordable.
- imtringued 4y ago
  I have read some Marxist books and everytime I read their proposed solutions I shake my head. How can anyone be so misguided? Of course, the reason why Marx is popular is that his criticism of capitalism is actually very close to the truth. Capitalists produce for the sake of profit. No profit means no production. Market economies try to optimize profits to 0%. Thus, capitalists will simply stop producing well before the market is being served. This is why farmers need subsidies from the government. They would try to keep a small fraction of the population under the threat of starvation to maintain high enough profits to justify private production. So poverty is actually considered a non problem. Anyone who has to go without their basic needs being met is there to increase profitability and justify further growth. Now, one should ask oneself. If markets exist to eliminate profits where are these hyper competitive industries that threaten to eat up/shut down your corporation if your profit is too low? Why doesn't their profit shrink to zero as one would expect? As mentioned above, extortion is a very easy way to maintain high profits. No entirely voluntary economic transaction can compete with extortion in terms of profit. So any capitalist economy with too many products will actually get worse than if there was a slight shortage of products. This is because the entire economy will shift towards extortive industries. Every industry will adopt a certain amount nastiness to stay competitive. Industries will try to consolidate into monopolies because they allow a greater degree of extortion.
imtringued 4y ago
A lot of the growth isn't meant for poor people. When people talk about endless growth being bad it usually means that there is no upper bound for wealth of a single person, leading to huge wealth concentration. What if the frontier was bounded by some multiple of the poorest person? Imagine capping salaries and capital gains to 1000 times the minimum wage. Bounded growth creates an incentive to help the bottom first.
neilwilson 4y ago
By having a class of people who don't believe in growth who want the job of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. That's why they don't believe in growth - it gives them a job where they can act morally superior while skimming a chunk of output for themselves. It's the middle class equivalent of giving a man a fish, rather than teaching them to fish. Productive growth, of course, is doing more with less, and just getting things to cycle faster. Nobody thinks the carbon cycle is unsustainable, however if you can find a way to get plants to do that cycle twice in a year rather than once you've doubled growth. That's where future growth needs to come from. Improvements in the speed of turn amongst sustainable production cycles.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Growth cannot be infinite. Future growth is never guaranteed, and less likely the more unsustainable the processes.
  - neilwilson 4y ago
    Well of course growth can’t be infinite. The Sun will explode in about five billion years.

neilwilson 4y ago

Growth is just doing more with less and is limited only by human ingenuity and getting the power of the sun and other nuclear forces to move in a different direction. You can create growth simply by moving financial numbers between computers faster. Or changing the numbers. Growth, like inflation is one of those humpty dumpty words that means different things to different people.