21 ms·

The Case for Degrowth

102 points by mitchbob 4y ago

mitchbob 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/2022.08.10-151410/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train https://archive.ph/2022.08.10-151410/https://www.lrb.co.uk/t...
focusgroup0 4y ago
- jgwil2 4y ago
  Not sure what you're talking about; the above phrase does not appear in TFA.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18829421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18829421
anm89 4y ago
We are in the biggest global/sovereign debt crisis of the last 100 year, maybe more. The things that will cause an explosive collapse in this scenario is shrinking population and a global shrinking economy. Debt needs growth. It's like a mortgage on a house. It's a good deal if the house is increasing in value. It can quickly turn bad if the house is losing value. Personally, I'd prefer to see that collapse happen but understand it would be incredibly nasty. I think most people drastically underestimate how fucked up the world would be if GDP and population fell by 1% annually for the next 10 years.
- xnx 4y ago
  An economy that is dependent on continuously increasing population is the mother of all pyramid schemes.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    When you read the comments in this article, everyone is basically arguing that abandoning the pyramid scheme and eliminating growth dependence is somehow going to make us poorer despite the fact that the vast majority of people in this thread only need growth to keep their jobs, not because they are unhappy with their massive salaries.
- eCa 4y ago
  Can you dive a bit deeper into why you would like to see our global civilization collapse? (I mean, if it doesn’t it’s not for lack of us trying. I just don’t see it as something to look forward to.)
  - anm89 4y ago
    Our current system is wrecking the environment. That seems like a good enough reason for me.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Debt is a social construct and ultimately a notional and notational reality, not a real one. Real wealth is not financial but physical --- "the annual produce and labour of the nation" in Adam Smith's formulation (and hence a flow rather than a stock as many commentators have noted). Debt and credit reflect claims on that wealth, but not the wealth itself. Disrupting the claim-making system does have profund effects upon distribution, but does not fundamentally affect the actual production function itself. That is, by reallocating debt, one may influence who has claims on wealth produced, but even an infinite expansion of those claims still runs into upper limits of production, that being the classic definition of runaway-printing-press monetary inflation. There are several post-WWII articles on prisoner-of-war camp economics, often based on tokenised (though not barter) transactions based on cigarettes and other standardised items, interacting with both relief packages (generally provided by the International Red Cross) and some amount of indigenous POW-camp services (barbering, laundry, and entertainment, for example). The characteristics, benefits, and limitations of strict monetary manipulation were made clear.
  - anm89 4y ago
    >debt is a social construct As opposed to what? A carbon based life form? A monster truck? Yes literally every thing that humans interact with that isn't constructed of atoms is a social construct. Contracts, agreements, trades, transactions. Every single concept in finance and economics. This isn't a profound statement
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Contrast with, say, physical or natural phenomena: the size of the Earth, solar insolation, the prevalence of various chemical elements within the Earth's crust, their organisation (or lack) into ores, their cycling through the biosphere, net primary productivity, and the like. A debt, by contrast, is a socially-recognised and generally legally sanctioned claim on another's wealth or productivity. That is, debt is fundamentally informational, and records a relationship, but that relationship is not fundamentally grounded in any underlying physical reality. As is noted, "debts that cannot be repaid won't", and when the notional fiction runs up against such a reality, the debt is retired. That is, the information is changed. There are numerous cultural, legal, and financial reasons to believe and behave otherwise, but ultimately, debts are a social, not a natural or intrinsic construct. Their behaviour is ultimately more a symptom than a cause of a larger growth or collapse. Debt wants growth, but need not have it. The principle challenge is that the modern monetary system based on central banks and fiat currencies was developed in a world of rapid economic growth. It need not be limited to such a world. Currency sovereigns can both retire debts and introduce new liquidity to maintain a flow which supports commercial transactions. A major problem to date has been that new liquidity introductions tend to be to the wealth-holding classes rather than those requiring currency to pay for current and essential demand and consumption. Again, there are historical reasons for this, but they are still cultural and notional, not some underlying Law of the Universe.
impossiblefork 4y ago
The problem with ideas like this is that it takes the ladder away from middle class and the poor. Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth. Without it the power of the wealthy over them would become a weight pressing down with such force that it would intolerable.
- xnx 4y ago
  Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much?
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much? No, but it's antithetical to everything we think and believe for Capital to not take its profits before everyone else.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Do not violate liquidity preference thou foul spendthrift.
  - api 4y ago
    The rich don’t take much. The vast majority of their wealth is paper. A billionaire who jet sets around and has five homes and a staff might at most consume the resources of a few hundred middle class Americans. You might approach the footprint of a medium sized town if you built your own orbital lair and lived like a cyberpunk oligarch in space. Maybe. Of course for some resources there is little difference at all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t eat much more than you do. Money is not physical. Start redistributing physical stuff and you’ll find that soaking the rich barely makes a dent.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      This is why you should ensure that the medium of exchange does not get stuck with people who don't need it. They block the economy for everyone else, preventing us from helping ourselves.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Among my thoughts as I read this, one which has recurred from time to time: it might be interesting to attempt some kind of reading club on HN in which an article or book is selected for future discussion. This piece runs about 10 pages printed, or roughly 5,000 words, which seems to challenge HN. And that's before considering that it's further discussing not one but four books, totalling over 1,000 pages. I'd be quite interested in hearing from those who've read one or all of these, and if there were some way to invoke MacBeth's weird sisters, and agree when we three (or however many) should meet again to discuss them ... would be of interest. There actually was a proposal for an HN book club ... 14 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067 Any interest now, and suggestions on how to structure this, would be appreciated.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Take it up with Dang. Could be a monthly post like the hiring posts. Probably rig up a poll for voting on next month’s book. You could make your own posts, but they would never get traction without some HN leadership blessings. HN used to have book recommendation posts pretty often, but maybe we’ve gotten less literary over time. I’ve read about a dozen books that were recommended here and they were all awesome.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    And of course I have (linking this thread). Thought I'd have that discussion here as well, though. The earlier thread addresses a number of thoughts / concerns / possibilities.
- sien 4y ago
  You can set up groups on Goodreads. There are groups for Metafilter and Econtalk and things. Why not set up one there and advertise it on HN and select a book and see how it goes?
nico 4y ago
On a slightly related note. I wonder what impact of volume pricing (ie. wholesale: cheap/unit, retail: expensive/unit) has in our society. What would happen if this was flipped and pricing per unit was directly correlated with volume (ie. more volume, more expensive per unit)? Could it work?
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  "society" doesn't decide if we should have volume pricing. The seller wants to sell more to the buyer, so they offer a discount. "society" could, on the other hand, decide to impose taxes on individuals that consume more than their fair share.
  - nico 4y ago
    I’m not thinking about why it happens or who is “the culprit”. Just wondering about the impact of such structure and what would happen if businesses/people decided to use something different.
mjfl 4y ago
This is all very abstract, so you can't really see the stupidity behind it. You can say "economic growth is out of control, we need to reduce GDP by 50% and get comfortable with it" and many people will applaud. But if you say things like "We are growing too much food, we need to reduce the amount of food grown worldwide by 50%", people will realize the much more morbid consequences of your ignorant prescription - mass starvation by millions of people. Of course then you start talking about managed, equitable degrowth in just developed countries, but then you realize that a lot of the economic activity in developed countries plugs into farming in developing countries (natural gas for ammonia for fertilizer) and you realize you can't escape. And then maybe you realize you should have just sat on your couch and shut up, which is what most people with these sorts of opinions should do.
- asabjorn 4y ago
  There also doesn't seem to be wide awareness that the degrowth people are currently intentionally sabotaging farming output. Sri Lankas food crisis is due to a forced stop in artificial fertilizer use and growth of only organic crops, and there are likewise farmer protests in the Netherlands (5th largest food producer), Belgium, Germany etc due to the governments pushing this. Closer to home the "inflation reduction act" spends $20 billion to put farmland out of farm use, and also implement incentives to force farmers to significantly reduce production. This will cause food shortages like it already has in Sri Lanka. Expect huge spikes in food prices like we've seen for gas.
  - api 4y ago
    Sometimes people just have to see the result of a policy to get it.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      Indeed. The problem is that all of us who already know "degrowth" is bad are going to have to suffer through the result along with them.
      - 4y ago
Manuel_D 4y ago
Degrowth is a euphemism for recession. That's literally what it is: receding economic activity. Degrowth proponents are among the most counterproductive advocates of climate policy, and are a huge source of ammunition for a opponents that try to claim that climate action is just anti-capitalism in disguise. Increases energy usage is not necessarily necessary for increased economic growth. Higher efficiency and less energy intensive lines of business provide growth with the same or even less energy use. Furthermore, increased energy use is only a problem if that energy comes from environmentally damaging sources. Building energy sources other than fossil fuels allows for growing energy use with less environmental impact.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  It's actually our response to Covid that really cemented the idea that we won't solve our environmental problems by asking people to consume less. People weren't prepared to put on a mask to save their own lives, they are sure as hell not going to vote for a government with policies that result in them consuming less, just so that people of the future wont have to deal with climate change. It's too far away and somebody else's problem. Degrowth will never willingly happen in a democratic country. In my view its a waste of time discussing. As you said, we need to find solutions to our environment problems that will make people richer, more comfortable, with more stuff.
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    I should also add to this comment that I think every individual _should_ review their own consumption and debt, and I have a lot of respect for those that do minimize their footprint. I also strongly support taxes and regulation that prevents people from consuming more than their fair share, or passing off the true cost of their consumption to others. I only meant to say that government policies that ask people to consume less across the board will never fly.
- mcjiggerlog 4y ago
  > Increased energy usage is not necessarily necessary for increased economic growth I disagree with this - economic growth has almost always perfectly aligned with increased energy use, however this is not a bad thing. The history of the human race has been about moving from less dense sources of energy to higher dense ones. From wood, to charcoal, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear fission, to nuclear fusion. Abundance of energy is an absolute must for economic growth. The good news is that what we have started to decouple our impact on the environment and economic growth. I would also go as far as saying that economic growth is a necessity for us to combat climate change. The development of advanced technology like fusion, better desalination, higher density and more efficient farming, will all help reduce our impact on the planet.
sega_sai 4y ago
It's certainly a thought provoking piece. I'm wondering how stable the system is if all countries decide to degrowth, but one doesn't play ball. Naively you'd think that country would start to dominate economically/politically, so others may have to 'defect' as well... But maybe that's too simplistic.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  The exact same logic makes nuclear disarmament extremely, almost laughably unlikely.
  - akimball 4y ago
    ...given the perpetuation of competitive nation-states.
    - candiodari 4y ago
      And while the number of nukes has decreased, the number of nations, fingers on nuclear buttons if you will, has steadily increased ... as has the threat they pose (recently both the US and Russia have tried to demonstrate supersonic nuclear-capable missiles. And while neither nation currently appears capable of actually carrying out a strike using such means, obviously they're both not that far from a working system)
- cryptonector 4y ago
  > ...if all countries decide to degrowth, ... Countries don't decide to degrowth -- people are certainly not willing, right now, to make such decisions. Other people make those decisions and force them on people. > but one doesn't play ball. And why wouldn't some country play ball, if not because it's better for it to keep growing and take advantage of other countries' partial suicides? All of this is premised on there being a current, extreme urgency for degrowth. The debates on that are hardly settled.
dredmorbius 4y ago
It's worth considering for the historical perspective as well. "Economic growth" is a mantra which emerged really only since the 1950s, and in the shadows respectively of the Great Depression, the collapse of Weimar Germany, the rise of Soviet Russia and Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist Communism, and of course World War II. It was not at all clear that a constantly growing capitalist market economy was possible. (The article itself puts relatively little focus on this, but it's very much part of the Zeitgeist in which Solow's work emerged.) The tune further changed in the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of the environmental movement and the first major oil shocks, after which conventional economics increasingly adopted the viewpoint not only that growth was good but that it was inevitable. I've examined the foundations of those premises for some years and consistently find that there's distressingly little there there. How much any of this is discussed in the books reviewed I'm not sure.
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thematrixturtle 4y ago
Japan is a living case study of degrowth: GDP has been essentially flat for the past 20 years. The scale below exaggerates small shifts, but it was $4968B in 2000 and $4937B in 2020. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.
- plankers 4y ago
  I'll probably be downvoted because this is stupid but I was wondering the other day whether Japan will be the first country to start factory breeding of humans, Brave New World style. If there was ever a candidate for it, Japan is certainly it.
- deleted 4y ago
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- elgenie 4y ago
  Japan’s GDP per capita is similar to what it was in the mid-90s despite sizable per-worker productivity gains because their population is aging rapidly. However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    And they will remain unpalatable as long as pensioners currently benefiting from the status quo (generous pensions paid in full, cheap healthcare etc) retain an absolute voting majority, which they will continue to do for several decades. Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.
imtringued 4y ago
Ah yes, compound interest, the magic that makes everything grow exponentially. I do not believe the human mind can grasp exponential growth. If compound interest is absolute then 3% interest over 2000 years is equivalent to colonizing every single planet, even the barren ones, in more than 50 trillion milkyways. Even at the speed of light it will take 4 years to get to alpha centauri, you're not getting to the edge of the universe in 2000 years, the actually achievable interest rate must therefore be much lower than 3%, most likely closer to 0% than to 3%. Before you argue that there will never be uninterrupted exponential growth, because of political instability and conflict, consider for a second that the inability to fulfill the endless exponential growth nonsense is the origin of the political instability and conflict.
- api 4y ago
  No, growth can’t go forever, but how far can it go? Obviously your trillion galaxies is absurd, but there’s a lot of room between absurd scenarios and where we are now. But ultimately that does just push back the question of how to deal with flattening of the curve. Even if we settled the whole solar system ala The Expanse, then what? Solar system scale Japanese style stagnation?
- brutusborn 4y ago
  Why do we need to colonize other planets? Most growth comes from inventing new things that induce demand. E.g. computers becoming efficient enough to be in everyone's pocket means _everyone wants one in their pocket._ (and thus GDP line goes up) Thus to continuously grow we need to continuously turn the earth-matter we have available into more and more valuable things. Certainly it's not infinite, but I doubt we need to colonize another planet to keep up current growth rate for many centuries, we just need to prioritize knowledge generation (and thus inventions that increase value) over consumption. This usually only occurs during wartime, when existential threats to nations mean that knowledge generation is essential to survival.
- nly 4y ago
  Not everything grows evenly at the same rate. You can have 20% growth in one area but 0% expansion in to the universe, like you suggest. It's like people saying buying property now is a great idea because we have 10%+ annualized inflation. Just because the CPI is >10%, it doesn't follow that houses prices will grow in an increasing interest rate environment. System complexity. Feedback loops. Human Behavior etc.
flaque 4y ago
Here's a few cases against degrowth: - https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-... - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/economic-growth-shouldn-t-be-a-death-sentence-for-earth?sref=R8NfLgwS https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/econom... The TL;DR is "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."
- jay80 4y ago
  Not really, they are just outsourcing resource intensive manufacturing processes to developing countries and then reimport the finished products thereby making it appear they achieve their growth by using less resources.
- yamrzou 4y ago
  For the bloomberg piece: https://archive.ph/2tFbt https://archive.ph/2tFbt It's worth noting that the two articles are written by the same person, Noah Smith.
scythe 4y ago
> by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’ No need to have some kind of "cultural revolution"? >Endless growth – green or not These arguments are all the same. They take the current rate of growth, plug in a time period longer than has elapsed since the death of vitalism as a theory of life (an idea which, today, is laughable to consider), and conclude that we need to stop growing immediately. Obviously we have to stop growing at some point. The Sun produces a finite amount of power [1], the density of the Universe is very low, etc. Why now? The eco-pessimists never answer this question, and that is because right now is the wrong time to stop growing. This article does not attempt to address it at all, but flings a few symbols around to put on the air of rigor. Bonus points for somehow managing to use the word "decolonise". At the current rate of growth, the right time would probably be in about 150 years. But the rate of growth has actually been slowing down over the last century, and will likely continue to gradually slow, as scientific discoveries continue to become more difficult. Taking that into account, the end of growth is probably half a millenium out, supposing a huge war or other disaster doesn't set us back. I suspect the real reason people want to advocate for the end of growth now is because everyone wants to be a revolutionary; everyone wants to make the kind of great, world-shaking advancement that Einstein or Fleming or Borlaug did. To admit that while we probably have to stop growing, it won't be for a long time — that would be sort of dull. You can't sell books about it. 1: Energy per unit time.
- dariosalvi78 4y ago
  the main message I get from degrowthers is that we should, first and foremost, abandon the idea of growth as the driver of our economy. After we have assumed that growth is silly, we can start discussing about how a post-growth economy will look like. It's going to be a slow process, probably mostly guided through legislation. The alternative is an increasing speed of crises and collapses (destroy and regrow).
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  Here's your answer: because if we continue on our current trajectory, in a mere 30-50 years, we will be experiencing significant effects of societal collapse due to climate change that make the current societal effects of ecological collapse we're experiencing (breakdown of supply chains, erosion of institutions, loss of biodiversity, record high global temperatures, etc.) seem like "the good old days." I'm talking "kids born today will die in a world that resembles Mad Max" kind of effects. We don't have 500 years to do something about that. We have to do it now.
pembrook 4y ago
Degrowth is basically Communism, but in reverse. The idea that you can centrally plan a strategic "shrinking" of an economy, and it will somehow end up better than the times humans have tried to centrally plan the "growth" of an economy (Eg. USSR, Cuba, North Korea, etc) is very amusing to me. Humans are animals, and when you create scarcity, you increase the rewards to exploitation and violence. We will quickly begin killing each other and engaging in power games to get what we want under any scenario of centrally-planned artificial scarcity. Humans are already de-growthing themselves naturally (the free market approach). Let's not screw this up by trying to engage in authoritarian central planning fantasies.
- dariosalvi78 4y ago
  the thing is; scarcity will be created by us animals if we keep our current economic model. But it is also true that we are a bit more clever than most animals and we can at least try to manage if not avoid scarcity.
RandomLensman 4y ago
So why now? Would it have been better to stop growing in Roman or medial times, for example? Or stop only in a 100 years? Degrowth seems to me like a vision of the future that assumes that humans should remain slaves of their environment and not become masters of it. If humans are to become the dominant species in the universe, degrowth will not help.
- sprucevoid 4y ago
  > So why now? From my reading of degrowth works the answer is: because now the global resource use induced by growth have accumulated enourmous negative externality costs, costs that will nedlessly increase further unless counteracted by degrowth policy. Food shortages, deadly heatwaves, property destruction. Direct dire costs to human health and welfare and rippling secondary effects. For example how would a scenario with hundreds of millions of climate refugees play out on top of current global political tensions? I see the degrowth view not as "we should never ever have growth again" but rather the current modes of growth have very tangible imminent (on an astronomical timescale) negative effects that we must deal with right now. If we fail to step up to the current challenge of provisioning health and welfare for beings on this planet how likely are we to manage an all universe encompassing expansion without it ending in catastrophe on the largest scale? You could see the climate change challenge, and the degrowth plan to tackle it, as a necessary step to get our house in order, before expanding out. Us attempting to expand into and shaping the universe is quite a task - so much could go right or wrong. I think Toby Ord's The Precipice[0] has a very useful framework for thinking about such risks. [0] https://theprecipice.com/ https://theprecipice.com/
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    Fair enough on the intermediate step possibility. However, it is often sold more like a return to simpler lifestyles for forever - or maybe the proponents I encountered just happen to lean that way. As far as dire scenarios are concerned, I struggle with them as usually the realities play out differently. Arguably in part because people do consider such scenarios.
refurb 4y ago
People love to rail against growth because they use it as some proxy for "consumerism" or "materialism". If you actually take a step back and realize that economic growth is what pays for infrastructure, social programs, public pensions, healthcare, the idea "we should just get comfortable with less" seems much less appealing.
cato_the_elder 4y ago
The "progressive" case for making things worse.
dariosalvi78 4y ago
degrowth is unavoidable: population will stop growing soon and natural resources cannot be exploited at the same rate as they are now. So we'd better prepare for a nice and managed post-growth world or we'll face the worst consequences of it.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Collapse now and avoid the rush. :)
deleted 4y ago
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ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Just apply a carbon tax. If you admit that a carbon tax would make us both richer and greener, then you're welcome to argue that on top of that we could do more. If you can't admit that clearly, then it's just more climate denial: oh it's too expensive to fix, we have to keep giving money to Russia, because insulation and heat pumps are a hoax.
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  I'd support a carbon tax that's pegged to the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere in some way, and rises exponentially with a linear increase in concentration.
jokoon 4y ago
Brilliant article. I don't entirely agree that degrowth belong to the elite. I'm quite poor in a developed country and I'm for degrowth. So maybe I'm still part of the elite. Anyway degrowth is going to create a lot of necessary poverty, which could be solved by the usual democracy to reduce that pesky inequality. It's true that we never really reduced inequality, we just threw a lot of GDP.
winReInstall 4y ago
Why is there never honesty in this talks. Even the degrowth in japan is subsidized with growth in other regions. Real degrowth is instability, is human nature going feral back to religous roots, make many copies, fight the outsiders unbelievers, recover make many copies. Cycling this drain, decomplexifies societies, loosing the ability to supply bureaucracy, research and experiments. Lots of countries worldwide partially circle or circled in this loop. One can not fix a situation, one does not talk and observe objectively. This includes disabilitys of the species as a system constraint.

102 points by mitchbob 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/2022.08.10-151410/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train https://archive.ph/2022.08.10-151410/https://www.lrb.co.uk/t...

focusgroup0 4y ago

jgwil2 4y ago
Not sure what you're talking about; the above phrase does not appear in TFA.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18829421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18829421

anm89 4y ago

We are in the biggest global/sovereign debt crisis of the last 100 year, maybe more. The things that will cause an explosive collapse in this scenario is shrinking population and a global shrinking economy. Debt needs growth. It's like a mortgage on a house. It's a good deal if the house is increasing in value. It can quickly turn bad if the house is losing value. Personally, I'd prefer to see that collapse happen but understand it would be incredibly nasty. I think most people drastically underestimate how fucked up the world would be if GDP and population fell by 1% annually for the next 10 years.

xnx 4y ago
An economy that is dependent on continuously increasing population is the mother of all pyramid schemes.
- imtringued 4y ago
  When you read the comments in this article, everyone is basically arguing that abandoning the pyramid scheme and eliminating growth dependence is somehow going to make us poorer despite the fact that the vast majority of people in this thread only need growth to keep their jobs, not because they are unhappy with their massive salaries.
eCa 4y ago
Can you dive a bit deeper into why you would like to see our global civilization collapse? (I mean, if it doesn’t it’s not for lack of us trying. I just don’t see it as something to look forward to.)
- anm89 4y ago
  Our current system is wrecking the environment. That seems like a good enough reason for me.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Debt is a social construct and ultimately a notional and notational reality, not a real one. Real wealth is not financial but physical --- "the annual produce and labour of the nation" in Adam Smith's formulation (and hence a flow rather than a stock as many commentators have noted). Debt and credit reflect claims on that wealth, but not the wealth itself. Disrupting the claim-making system does have profund effects upon distribution, but does not fundamentally affect the actual production function itself. That is, by reallocating debt, one may influence who has claims on wealth produced, but even an infinite expansion of those claims still runs into upper limits of production, that being the classic definition of runaway-printing-press monetary inflation. There are several post-WWII articles on prisoner-of-war camp economics, often based on tokenised (though not barter) transactions based on cigarettes and other standardised items, interacting with both relief packages (generally provided by the International Red Cross) and some amount of indigenous POW-camp services (barbering, laundry, and entertainment, for example). The characteristics, benefits, and limitations of strict monetary manipulation were made clear.
- anm89 4y ago
  >debt is a social construct As opposed to what? A carbon based life form? A monster truck? Yes literally every thing that humans interact with that isn't constructed of atoms is a social construct. Contracts, agreements, trades, transactions. Every single concept in finance and economics. This isn't a profound statement
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Contrast with, say, physical or natural phenomena: the size of the Earth, solar insolation, the prevalence of various chemical elements within the Earth's crust, their organisation (or lack) into ores, their cycling through the biosphere, net primary productivity, and the like. A debt, by contrast, is a socially-recognised and generally legally sanctioned claim on another's wealth or productivity. That is, debt is fundamentally informational, and records a relationship, but that relationship is not fundamentally grounded in any underlying physical reality. As is noted, "debts that cannot be repaid won't", and when the notional fiction runs up against such a reality, the debt is retired. That is, the information is changed. There are numerous cultural, legal, and financial reasons to believe and behave otherwise, but ultimately, debts are a social, not a natural or intrinsic construct. Their behaviour is ultimately more a symptom than a cause of a larger growth or collapse. Debt wants growth, but need not have it. The principle challenge is that the modern monetary system based on central banks and fiat currencies was developed in a world of rapid economic growth. It need not be limited to such a world. Currency sovereigns can both retire debts and introduce new liquidity to maintain a flow which supports commercial transactions. A major problem to date has been that new liquidity introductions tend to be to the wealth-holding classes rather than those requiring currency to pay for current and essential demand and consumption. Again, there are historical reasons for this, but they are still cultural and notional, not some underlying Law of the Universe.

impossiblefork 4y ago

The problem with ideas like this is that it takes the ladder away from middle class and the poor. Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth. Without it the power of the wealthy over them would become a weight pressing down with such force that it would intolerable.

xnx 4y ago
Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much?
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much? No, but it's antithetical to everything we think and believe for Capital to not take its profits before everyone else.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Do not violate liquidity preference thou foul spendthrift.
- api 4y ago
  The rich don’t take much. The vast majority of their wealth is paper. A billionaire who jet sets around and has five homes and a staff might at most consume the resources of a few hundred middle class Americans. You might approach the footprint of a medium sized town if you built your own orbital lair and lived like a cyberpunk oligarch in space. Maybe. Of course for some resources there is little difference at all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t eat much more than you do. Money is not physical. Start redistributing physical stuff and you’ll find that soaking the rich barely makes a dent.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    This is why you should ensure that the medium of exchange does not get stuck with people who don't need it. They block the economy for everyone else, preventing us from helping ourselves.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Among my thoughts as I read this, one which has recurred from time to time: it might be interesting to attempt some kind of reading club on HN in which an article or book is selected for future discussion. This piece runs about 10 pages printed, or roughly 5,000 words, which seems to challenge HN. And that's before considering that it's further discussing not one but four books, totalling over 1,000 pages. I'd be quite interested in hearing from those who've read one or all of these, and if there were some way to invoke MacBeth's weird sisters, and agree when we three (or however many) should meet again to discuss them ... would be of interest. There actually was a proposal for an HN book club ... 14 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067 Any interest now, and suggestions on how to structure this, would be appreciated.

dougmwne 4y ago
Take it up with Dang. Could be a monthly post like the hiring posts. Probably rig up a poll for voting on next month’s book. You could make your own posts, but they would never get traction without some HN leadership blessings. HN used to have book recommendation posts pretty often, but maybe we’ve gotten less literary over time. I’ve read about a dozen books that were recommended here and they were all awesome.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  And of course I have (linking this thread). Thought I'd have that discussion here as well, though. The earlier thread addresses a number of thoughts / concerns / possibilities.
sien 4y ago
You can set up groups on Goodreads. There are groups for Metafilter and Econtalk and things. Why not set up one there and advertise it on HN and select a book and see how it goes?

nico 4y ago

On a slightly related note. I wonder what impact of volume pricing (ie. wholesale: cheap/unit, retail: expensive/unit) has in our society. What would happen if this was flipped and pricing per unit was directly correlated with volume (ie. more volume, more expensive per unit)? Could it work?

jay_kyburz 4y ago
"society" doesn't decide if we should have volume pricing. The seller wants to sell more to the buyer, so they offer a discount. "society" could, on the other hand, decide to impose taxes on individuals that consume more than their fair share.
- nico 4y ago
  I’m not thinking about why it happens or who is “the culprit”. Just wondering about the impact of such structure and what would happen if businesses/people decided to use something different.

mjfl 4y ago

This is all very abstract, so you can't really see the stupidity behind it. You can say "economic growth is out of control, we need to reduce GDP by 50% and get comfortable with it" and many people will applaud. But if you say things like "We are growing too much food, we need to reduce the amount of food grown worldwide by 50%", people will realize the much more morbid consequences of your ignorant prescription - mass starvation by millions of people. Of course then you start talking about managed, equitable degrowth in just developed countries, but then you realize that a lot of the economic activity in developed countries plugs into farming in developing countries (natural gas for ammonia for fertilizer) and you realize you can't escape. And then maybe you realize you should have just sat on your couch and shut up, which is what most people with these sorts of opinions should do.

asabjorn 4y ago
There also doesn't seem to be wide awareness that the degrowth people are currently intentionally sabotaging farming output. Sri Lankas food crisis is due to a forced stop in artificial fertilizer use and growth of only organic crops, and there are likewise farmer protests in the Netherlands (5th largest food producer), Belgium, Germany etc due to the governments pushing this. Closer to home the "inflation reduction act" spends $20 billion to put farmland out of farm use, and also implement incentives to force farmers to significantly reduce production. This will cause food shortages like it already has in Sri Lanka. Expect huge spikes in food prices like we've seen for gas.
- api 4y ago
  Sometimes people just have to see the result of a policy to get it.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Indeed. The problem is that all of us who already know "degrowth" is bad are going to have to suffer through the result along with them.
    - 4y ago

Manuel_D 4y ago

Degrowth is a euphemism for recession. That's literally what it is: receding economic activity. Degrowth proponents are among the most counterproductive advocates of climate policy, and are a huge source of ammunition for a opponents that try to claim that climate action is just anti-capitalism in disguise. Increases energy usage is not necessarily necessary for increased economic growth. Higher efficiency and less energy intensive lines of business provide growth with the same or even less energy use. Furthermore, increased energy use is only a problem if that energy comes from environmentally damaging sources. Building energy sources other than fossil fuels allows for growing energy use with less environmental impact.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
It's actually our response to Covid that really cemented the idea that we won't solve our environmental problems by asking people to consume less. People weren't prepared to put on a mask to save their own lives, they are sure as hell not going to vote for a government with policies that result in them consuming less, just so that people of the future wont have to deal with climate change. It's too far away and somebody else's problem. Degrowth will never willingly happen in a democratic country. In my view its a waste of time discussing. As you said, we need to find solutions to our environment problems that will make people richer, more comfortable, with more stuff.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  I should also add to this comment that I think every individual _should_ review their own consumption and debt, and I have a lot of respect for those that do minimize their footprint. I also strongly support taxes and regulation that prevents people from consuming more than their fair share, or passing off the true cost of their consumption to others. I only meant to say that government policies that ask people to consume less across the board will never fly.
mcjiggerlog 4y ago
> Increased energy usage is not necessarily necessary for increased economic growth I disagree with this - economic growth has almost always perfectly aligned with increased energy use, however this is not a bad thing. The history of the human race has been about moving from less dense sources of energy to higher dense ones. From wood, to charcoal, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear fission, to nuclear fusion. Abundance of energy is an absolute must for economic growth. The good news is that what we have started to decouple our impact on the environment and economic growth. I would also go as far as saying that economic growth is a necessity for us to combat climate change. The development of advanced technology like fusion, better desalination, higher density and more efficient farming, will all help reduce our impact on the planet.

sega_sai 4y ago

It's certainly a thought provoking piece. I'm wondering how stable the system is if all countries decide to degrowth, but one doesn't play ball. Naively you'd think that country would start to dominate economically/politically, so others may have to 'defect' as well... But maybe that's too simplistic.

kspacewalk2 4y ago
The exact same logic makes nuclear disarmament extremely, almost laughably unlikely.
- akimball 4y ago
  ...given the perpetuation of competitive nation-states.
  - candiodari 4y ago
    And while the number of nukes has decreased, the number of nations, fingers on nuclear buttons if you will, has steadily increased ... as has the threat they pose (recently both the US and Russia have tried to demonstrate supersonic nuclear-capable missiles. And while neither nation currently appears capable of actually carrying out a strike using such means, obviously they're both not that far from a working system)
cryptonector 4y ago
> ...if all countries decide to degrowth, ... Countries don't decide to degrowth -- people are certainly not willing, right now, to make such decisions. Other people make those decisions and force them on people. > but one doesn't play ball. And why wouldn't some country play ball, if not because it's better for it to keep growing and take advantage of other countries' partial suicides? All of this is premised on there being a current, extreme urgency for degrowth. The debates on that are hardly settled.

dredmorbius 4y ago

It's worth considering for the historical perspective as well. "Economic growth" is a mantra which emerged really only since the 1950s, and in the shadows respectively of the Great Depression, the collapse of Weimar Germany, the rise of Soviet Russia and Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist Communism, and of course World War II. It was not at all clear that a constantly growing capitalist market economy was possible. (The article itself puts relatively little focus on this, but it's very much part of the Zeitgeist in which Solow's work emerged.) The tune further changed in the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of the environmental movement and the first major oil shocks, after which conventional economics increasingly adopted the viewpoint not only that growth was good but that it was inevitable. I've examined the foundations of those premises for some years and consistently find that there's distressingly little there there. How much any of this is discussed in the books reviewed I'm not sure.

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thematrixturtle 4y ago

Japan is a living case study of degrowth: GDP has been essentially flat for the past 20 years. The scale below exaggerates small shifts, but it was $4968B in 2000 and $4937B in 2020. https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.

plankers 4y ago
I'll probably be downvoted because this is stupid but I was wondering the other day whether Japan will be the first country to start factory breeding of humans, Brave New World style. If there was ever a candidate for it, Japan is certainly it.
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elgenie 4y ago
Japan’s GDP per capita is similar to what it was in the mid-90s despite sizable per-worker productivity gains because their population is aging rapidly. However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  And they will remain unpalatable as long as pensioners currently benefiting from the status quo (generous pensions paid in full, cheap healthcare etc) retain an absolute voting majority, which they will continue to do for several decades. Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.

imtringued 4y ago

Ah yes, compound interest, the magic that makes everything grow exponentially. I do not believe the human mind can grasp exponential growth. If compound interest is absolute then 3% interest over 2000 years is equivalent to colonizing every single planet, even the barren ones, in more than 50 trillion milkyways. Even at the speed of light it will take 4 years to get to alpha centauri, you're not getting to the edge of the universe in 2000 years, the actually achievable interest rate must therefore be much lower than 3%, most likely closer to 0% than to 3%. Before you argue that there will never be uninterrupted exponential growth, because of political instability and conflict, consider for a second that the inability to fulfill the endless exponential growth nonsense is the origin of the political instability and conflict.

api 4y ago
No, growth can’t go forever, but how far can it go? Obviously your trillion galaxies is absurd, but there’s a lot of room between absurd scenarios and where we are now. But ultimately that does just push back the question of how to deal with flattening of the curve. Even if we settled the whole solar system ala The Expanse, then what? Solar system scale Japanese style stagnation?
brutusborn 4y ago
Why do we need to colonize other planets? Most growth comes from inventing new things that induce demand. E.g. computers becoming efficient enough to be in everyone's pocket means _everyone wants one in their pocket._ (and thus GDP line goes up) Thus to continuously grow we need to continuously turn the earth-matter we have available into more and more valuable things. Certainly it's not infinite, but I doubt we need to colonize another planet to keep up current growth rate for many centuries, we just need to prioritize knowledge generation (and thus inventions that increase value) over consumption. This usually only occurs during wartime, when existential threats to nations mean that knowledge generation is essential to survival.
nly 4y ago
Not everything grows evenly at the same rate. You can have 20% growth in one area but 0% expansion in to the universe, like you suggest. It's like people saying buying property now is a great idea because we have 10%+ annualized inflation. Just because the CPI is >10%, it doesn't follow that houses prices will grow in an increasing interest rate environment. System complexity. Feedback loops. Human Behavior etc.

flaque 4y ago

Here's a few cases against degrowth: - https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-... - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/economic-growth-shouldn-t-be-a-death-sentence-for-earth?sref=R8NfLgwS https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/econom... The TL;DR is "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."

jay80 4y ago
Not really, they are just outsourcing resource intensive manufacturing processes to developing countries and then reimport the finished products thereby making it appear they achieve their growth by using less resources.
yamrzou 4y ago
For the bloomberg piece: https://archive.ph/2tFbt https://archive.ph/2tFbt It's worth noting that the two articles are written by the same person, Noah Smith.

scythe 4y ago

> by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’ No need to have some kind of "cultural revolution"? >Endless growth – green or not These arguments are all the same. They take the current rate of growth, plug in a time period longer than has elapsed since the death of vitalism as a theory of life (an idea which, today, is laughable to consider), and conclude that we need to stop growing immediately. Obviously we have to stop growing at some point. The Sun produces a finite amount of power [1], the density of the Universe is very low, etc. Why now? The eco-pessimists never answer this question, and that is because right now is the wrong time to stop growing. This article does not attempt to address it at all, but flings a few symbols around to put on the air of rigor. Bonus points for somehow managing to use the word "decolonise". At the current rate of growth, the right time would probably be in about 150 years. But the rate of growth has actually been slowing down over the last century, and will likely continue to gradually slow, as scientific discoveries continue to become more difficult. Taking that into account, the end of growth is probably half a millenium out, supposing a huge war or other disaster doesn't set us back. I suspect the real reason people want to advocate for the end of growth now is because everyone wants to be a revolutionary; everyone wants to make the kind of great, world-shaking advancement that Einstein or Fleming or Borlaug did. To admit that while we probably have to stop growing, it won't be for a long time — that would be sort of dull. You can't sell books about it. 1: Energy per unit time.

dariosalvi78 4y ago
the main message I get from degrowthers is that we should, first and foremost, abandon the idea of growth as the driver of our economy. After we have assumed that growth is silly, we can start discussing about how a post-growth economy will look like. It's going to be a slow process, probably mostly guided through legislation. The alternative is an increasing speed of crises and collapses (destroy and regrow).
actually_a_dog 4y ago
Here's your answer: because if we continue on our current trajectory, in a mere 30-50 years, we will be experiencing significant effects of societal collapse due to climate change that make the current societal effects of ecological collapse we're experiencing (breakdown of supply chains, erosion of institutions, loss of biodiversity, record high global temperatures, etc.) seem like "the good old days." I'm talking "kids born today will die in a world that resembles Mad Max" kind of effects. We don't have 500 years to do something about that. We have to do it now.

pembrook 4y ago

Degrowth is basically Communism, but in reverse. The idea that you can centrally plan a strategic "shrinking" of an economy, and it will somehow end up better than the times humans have tried to centrally plan the "growth" of an economy (Eg. USSR, Cuba, North Korea, etc) is very amusing to me. Humans are animals, and when you create scarcity, you increase the rewards to exploitation and violence. We will quickly begin killing each other and engaging in power games to get what we want under any scenario of centrally-planned artificial scarcity. Humans are already de-growthing themselves naturally (the free market approach). Let's not screw this up by trying to engage in authoritarian central planning fantasies.

dariosalvi78 4y ago
the thing is; scarcity will be created by us animals if we keep our current economic model. But it is also true that we are a bit more clever than most animals and we can at least try to manage if not avoid scarcity.

RandomLensman 4y ago

So why now? Would it have been better to stop growing in Roman or medial times, for example? Or stop only in a 100 years? Degrowth seems to me like a vision of the future that assumes that humans should remain slaves of their environment and not become masters of it. If humans are to become the dominant species in the universe, degrowth will not help.

sprucevoid 4y ago
> So why now? From my reading of degrowth works the answer is: because now the global resource use induced by growth have accumulated enourmous negative externality costs, costs that will nedlessly increase further unless counteracted by degrowth policy. Food shortages, deadly heatwaves, property destruction. Direct dire costs to human health and welfare and rippling secondary effects. For example how would a scenario with hundreds of millions of climate refugees play out on top of current global political tensions? I see the degrowth view not as "we should never ever have growth again" but rather the current modes of growth have very tangible imminent (on an astronomical timescale) negative effects that we must deal with right now. If we fail to step up to the current challenge of provisioning health and welfare for beings on this planet how likely are we to manage an all universe encompassing expansion without it ending in catastrophe on the largest scale? You could see the climate change challenge, and the degrowth plan to tackle it, as a necessary step to get our house in order, before expanding out. Us attempting to expand into and shaping the universe is quite a task - so much could go right or wrong. I think Toby Ord's The Precipice[0] has a very useful framework for thinking about such risks. [0] https://theprecipice.com/ https://theprecipice.com/
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Fair enough on the intermediate step possibility. However, it is often sold more like a return to simpler lifestyles for forever - or maybe the proponents I encountered just happen to lean that way. As far as dire scenarios are concerned, I struggle with them as usually the realities play out differently. Arguably in part because people do consider such scenarios.

refurb 4y ago

People love to rail against growth because they use it as some proxy for "consumerism" or "materialism". If you actually take a step back and realize that economic growth is what pays for infrastructure, social programs, public pensions, healthcare, the idea "we should just get comfortable with less" seems much less appealing.

cato_the_elder 4y ago

The "progressive" case for making things worse.

dariosalvi78 4y ago

degrowth is unavoidable: population will stop growing soon and natural resources cannot be exploited at the same rate as they are now. So we'd better prepare for a nice and managed post-growth world or we'll face the worst consequences of it.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Collapse now and avoid the rush. :)

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ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Just apply a carbon tax. If you admit that a carbon tax would make us both richer and greener, then you're welcome to argue that on top of that we could do more. If you can't admit that clearly, then it's just more climate denial: oh it's too expensive to fix, we have to keep giving money to Russia, because insulation and heat pumps are a hoax.

actually_a_dog 4y ago
I'd support a carbon tax that's pegged to the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere in some way, and rises exponentially with a linear increase in concentration.

jokoon 4y ago

Brilliant article. I don't entirely agree that degrowth belong to the elite. I'm quite poor in a developed country and I'm for degrowth. So maybe I'm still part of the elite. Anyway degrowth is going to create a lot of necessary poverty, which could be solved by the usual democracy to reduce that pesky inequality. It's true that we never really reduced inequality, we just threw a lot of GDP.

winReInstall 4y ago

Why is there never honesty in this talks. Even the degrowth in japan is subsidized with growth in other regions. Real degrowth is instability, is human nature going feral back to religous roots, make many copies, fight the outsiders unbelievers, recover make many copies. Cycling this drain, decomplexifies societies, loosing the ability to supply bureaucracy, research and experiments. Lots of countries worldwide partially circle or circled in this loop. One can not fix a situation, one does not talk and observe objectively. This includes disabilitys of the species as a system constraint.