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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 th

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.
    - imgabe 4y ago
      It is not stuck. The billionaires are not hoarding all the dollars. They have stock in their companies, which is worth varying amounts of dollars. Them owning stock does not deprive you of any dollars.
      - tremon 4y ago
        Them owning real estate keeps the real estate off the market, thereby increasing the price for everyone else.
        imgabe 4y ago
        Real estate is not the medium of exchange. And the answer there is to build more real estate and have high taxes on any property that isn't a primary residence. There's "rich people" buying houses, which are investment funds that buy property to rent - that is still availalbe on the market and isn't decreasing the supply of housing. Rich people buying homes for personal use can't have an appreciable effect on pricing. You couldn't afford a billionaire's eighth home in whatever city even if it were available for sale anyway.
        collegeburner 4y ago
        i dont think the cause of housing shortage is billionaires with their 3 vacation homes. there's just not enough of them to make a difference.
        jiriknesl 4y ago
        Which can be easily resolved by taking building regulations from NIMBYs and giving them to YIMBYs and letting people build build more or less anything anywhere. 1000 billionaires having 5000 houses have no effect in comparison with hundreds of thousands of houses not built because of regulations.
mulmen 4y ago
This seems to conflate the ideas of growth and value. Labor creates some growth but is mostly value. Value is the reallocation of existing wealth. Growth is the creation of new wealth. Both happen when we do (productive) work. Capital needs to get comfortable with the idea that they must "spend money to make money".
- bsedlm 4y ago
  I'm not sure I follow... value is the realocation of wealth? hmm, surely to realocate wealth has some value, but what's the relation between wealth and value? also, what about rent? what does rent do to wealth? to growth? to value?
  - mulmen 4y ago
    Yes, the reallocated wealth is itself previously captured growth. Value is created from wealth when it is reallocated but while it is held no value is created.
pessimizer 4y ago
The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious. Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn. What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security. They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork. We don't need more growth, we need more humanity. edit: I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry.
- newsclues 4y ago
  And yet the upper classes aren’t exactly leading the way.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  > I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry. I wouldn’t — and there’s been times I was quite hungry while homeless. Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    > your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me. That's entirely up for discussion. Civilization has imposed a lot of choices on you that you may not like.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      In the same sense any rights are “entirely up for discussion”. Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        No, in a different sense, because the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right. The rights you have were decided upon by people who aren't you, and imposed on you. I'm theoretically sympathetic to your wanting to opt out of public services, but it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire.
wmf 4y ago
Usually the degrowth people also advocate for massive redistribution so that everyone would be equally poor. I doubt that's politically possible in most of the world so the alternative would be feudal degrowth which, as you said, is evil.
dredmorbius 4y ago
This observation begs the questions: Is this the only such ladder? And why is it that economic growth seems to be the only ladder recognised in the economic mainstream for poverty alleviation? The latter question is one that's addressed often in the writing and talks of Herman Daly, one example I've recently come across being a 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the CASSE podcast, which discusses Daly's work and academic heritage: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-steady-stater-72324277/episode/giving-thanks-a-conversation-with-herman-74282469/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-steady-stater-7232427... A more useful framing of the question might be to assume that degrowth is a given, whether you believe this or not, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns. The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth and absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms which notes that the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now), without reallocation. But wealth and livelihood allocation are social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, several times.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  It’s certainly the best ladder I’m aware of that we’ve discovered- you climb it, by and large, by providing value to other people. A little value to a lot of people, usually. And because you are producing new value, you don’t provoke a conflict by reallocating the value away from the previous people. Most older ladders were providing a lot of value to a few existing rulers, and concentrated the utility-allocating aspects of society in the hands of a few. And much of the value being provided was through violent seizure.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    Eventually these ladders have a top. The 20th century is a mere aberration in growth in human timescales. It's easy to say this is the best - but we're simply biased - it was the best, for us, for a time, largely due to hegemony. The cracks are rapidly showing. Eventually knew value can't be created out of massive scientific advancements (low hanging fruit) we've had. New value will come from others (labor cost reductions to the far east, for example.)
imtringued 4y ago
Isn't it odd that without the poor get poorer even though common sense tells you that a lack of growth shouldn't make you poorer? Or think about it this way, when there is no growth left, you must actually get people to cooperate with each other and as far as I know we never learned how to do that.
worik 4y ago
>Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth. Why is that? It is OK to take from the very rich to help the very poor. All the stories I have read say that the general wealth is increasing but distribution getting more skewed. So I do not think endless growth is the answer to maintaining the middle class
- pauldenton 4y ago
  Well of course it is getting more skewed. A lot of industries have not actually become more productive. Industries where making the first copy is very difficult, and subsequent copies are basically free, be it software, books, movies, TV. Economies of scale, opening to new markets means those returns are higher than ever. Compare that to a janitor pushing a broom. How has he become more efficient in the last 50 years. And a lot of industries seem to have had negative productivity growth, the ratio of administrators to professors in college is going in the wrong direction
dariosalvi78 4y ago
you need distribution of wealth, not growth for that
pjc50 4y ago
The keyword people are looking for is "r > g". That is, can the return on capital be higher than the overall growth? https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feab... "r > g" societies are ones where the wealth is concentrating. This can be masked if g is positive and everyone else is also getting better off in absolute terms. "r > (g=0)" is therefore one where the rich are getting richer in a zero sum way; because there isn't any growth, you can only make a fortune by taking it off other people. "0 >= g > r" on the other hand looks extremely different from today: the return on capital is zero or negative. How can you invest in that environment? Negative interest rates? Negative retirement savings? (My somewhat bleak conclusion is therefore "r > g > 0 will remain, but with increasing catastrophes that wipe out chunks of both r and g")

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.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    It is not stuck. The billionaires are not hoarding all the dollars. They have stock in their companies, which is worth varying amounts of dollars. Them owning stock does not deprive you of any dollars.
    - tremon 4y ago
      Them owning real estate keeps the real estate off the market, thereby increasing the price for everyone else.
      - imgabe 4y ago
        Real estate is not the medium of exchange. And the answer there is to build more real estate and have high taxes on any property that isn't a primary residence. There's "rich people" buying houses, which are investment funds that buy property to rent - that is still availalbe on the market and isn't decreasing the supply of housing. Rich people buying homes for personal use can't have an appreciable effect on pricing. You couldn't afford a billionaire's eighth home in whatever city even if it were available for sale anyway.
      - collegeburner 4y ago
        i dont think the cause of housing shortage is billionaires with their 3 vacation homes. there's just not enough of them to make a difference.
      - jiriknesl 4y ago
        Which can be easily resolved by taking building regulations from NIMBYs and giving them to YIMBYs and letting people build build more or less anything anywhere. 1000 billionaires having 5000 houses have no effect in comparison with hundreds of thousands of houses not built because of regulations.

mulmen 4y ago

This seems to conflate the ideas of growth and value. Labor creates some growth but is mostly value. Value is the reallocation of existing wealth. Growth is the creation of new wealth. Both happen when we do (productive) work. Capital needs to get comfortable with the idea that they must "spend money to make money".

bsedlm 4y ago
I'm not sure I follow... value is the realocation of wealth? hmm, surely to realocate wealth has some value, but what's the relation between wealth and value? also, what about rent? what does rent do to wealth? to growth? to value?
- mulmen 4y ago
  Yes, the reallocated wealth is itself previously captured growth. Value is created from wealth when it is reallocated but while it is held no value is created.

pessimizer 4y ago

The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious. Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn. What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security. They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork. We don't need more growth, we need more humanity. edit: I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry.

newsclues 4y ago
And yet the upper classes aren’t exactly leading the way.
zmgsabst 4y ago
> I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry. I wouldn’t — and there’s been times I was quite hungry while homeless. Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me. That's entirely up for discussion. Civilization has imposed a lot of choices on you that you may not like.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    In the same sense any rights are “entirely up for discussion”. Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      No, in a different sense, because the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right. The rights you have were decided upon by people who aren't you, and imposed on you. I'm theoretically sympathetic to your wanting to opt out of public services, but it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire.

wmf 4y ago

Usually the degrowth people also advocate for massive redistribution so that everyone would be equally poor. I doubt that's politically possible in most of the world so the alternative would be feudal degrowth which, as you said, is evil.

dredmorbius 4y ago

This observation begs the questions: Is this the only such ladder? And why is it that economic growth seems to be the only ladder recognised in the economic mainstream for poverty alleviation? The latter question is one that's addressed often in the writing and talks of Herman Daly, one example I've recently come across being a 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the CASSE podcast, which discusses Daly's work and academic heritage: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-steady-stater-72324277/episode/giving-thanks-a-conversation-with-herman-74282469/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-steady-stater-7232427... A more useful framing of the question might be to assume that degrowth is a given, whether you believe this or not, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns. The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth and absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms which notes that the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now), without reallocation. But wealth and livelihood allocation are social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, several times.

mattnewton 4y ago
It’s certainly the best ladder I’m aware of that we’ve discovered- you climb it, by and large, by providing value to other people. A little value to a lot of people, usually. And because you are producing new value, you don’t provoke a conflict by reallocating the value away from the previous people. Most older ladders were providing a lot of value to a few existing rulers, and concentrated the utility-allocating aspects of society in the hands of a few. And much of the value being provided was through violent seizure.
- juve1996 4y ago
  Eventually these ladders have a top. The 20th century is a mere aberration in growth in human timescales. It's easy to say this is the best - but we're simply biased - it was the best, for us, for a time, largely due to hegemony. The cracks are rapidly showing. Eventually knew value can't be created out of massive scientific advancements (low hanging fruit) we've had. New value will come from others (labor cost reductions to the far east, for example.)

imtringued 4y ago

Isn't it odd that without the poor get poorer even though common sense tells you that a lack of growth shouldn't make you poorer? Or think about it this way, when there is no growth left, you must actually get people to cooperate with each other and as far as I know we never learned how to do that.

worik 4y ago

>Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth. Why is that? It is OK to take from the very rich to help the very poor. All the stories I have read say that the general wealth is increasing but distribution getting more skewed. So I do not think endless growth is the answer to maintaining the middle class

pauldenton 4y ago
Well of course it is getting more skewed. A lot of industries have not actually become more productive. Industries where making the first copy is very difficult, and subsequent copies are basically free, be it software, books, movies, TV. Economies of scale, opening to new markets means those returns are higher than ever. Compare that to a janitor pushing a broom. How has he become more efficient in the last 50 years. And a lot of industries seem to have had negative productivity growth, the ratio of administrators to professors in college is going in the wrong direction

dariosalvi78 4y ago

you need distribution of wealth, not growth for that

pjc50 4y ago

The keyword people are looking for is "r > g". That is, can the return on capital be higher than the overall growth? https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/e1b9254e-f476-11e3-a143-00144feab... "r > g" societies are ones where the wealth is concentrating. This can be masked if g is positive and everyone else is also getting better off in absolute terms. "r > (g=0)" is therefore one where the rich are getting richer in a zero sum way; because there isn't any growth, you can only make a fortune by taking it off other people. "0 >= g > r" on the other hand looks extremely different from today: the return on capital is zero or negative. How can you invest in that environment? Negative interest rates? Negative retirement savings? (My somewhat bleak conclusion is therefore "r > g > 0 will remain, but with increasing catastrophes that wipe out chunks of both r and g")