10 ms·

Degrowth and the monkey's paw

79 points by jseliger 3y ago

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
> So why is it hard to decarbonise our energy systems? The rules against wind turbines and solar farms weren’t lobbied for by top-hatted capitalists, but by campaigners who think of themselves as protectors of England’s green and pleasant land: not BP and Shell, but the CPRE and the RSPB and countless local groups, and politicians seeking to accommodate them. The combination of smugness and gaslighting makes me genuinely angry.
- epistasis 3y ago
  I'm not sure if you're accusing the author or the subjects of this paragraph of smugness and gaslighting.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    The author. I genuinely didn't expect the next phase of climate change denial to be trying to rewrite history to blame environmentalists for stopping progress.
    - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
      Blaming the messenger has been standard practice for a long time.
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        Specifically highlighting Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch as people not responsible for climate denial is so aggressively egregious it taints everything else these "roots of progress" folk are advocating.
        epistasis 3y ago
        I don't understand your assertion of gaslighting or smugness, honestly. Koch and Murdoch do not enter into the point he is making, and neither does the standard climate denialism that these two devils have perpetrated on so much of the population. Instead, the accusation is that ostensibly "environmental" groups are prioritizing "human enjoyment of green environments" over actual ecosystem preservation and climate action. This is a trend for all the environmental groups that have not updated strategy since the 1970s. Preserving our current economy, our current system, means certain ecocide. Yet these groups are entirely set up to preserve the status quo, rather than accelerating drastic change to the economy and human systems. In my local town, this manifests as aged people advocating to stop the construction of a building that could house 100 people, because 3 urban trees would be cut down, while at the same time accepting that those 100 people will not be putting pressure on housing in further away, more sensitive areas, where housing will result in hundreds of trees being cut down. In short, they are preserving their view, preserving existing human structures, instead of allowing the needs to humans to be met with the lowest environmental impact. This is also manifesting as people blocking newel student housing on campus, using "environmental" laws, even though the result is that these same students must now commute long distances at much much higher environments costs than being able to live on campus. Perhaps the CPRE and RSPB are different than what's going on in the US. But here in the US, the backwards "environmental groups cause more damage locally than even Murdoch or Koch, and do it hypocritically. To me, this makes them villains greater than Koch and Murdoch, at least in local action.
green_man_lives 3y ago
[flagged]
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  From the guidelines: > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, it's got a whopping 10 upvotes (at the time of your comment). Pretty poor astroturfing it is.
  - green_man_lives 3y ago
    My bad
coderintherye 3y ago
I like the author's approach, as this problem really comes down to one of various interest groups and their interests and incentives. In the U.S., we subsidize home ownership through mortgage interest tax breaks and various other legislation and we treat homes as investments. Naturally then, most homeowners will want to continue to push for anything that increases the value of that investment and oppose anything that decreases it (e.g. building more housing). It will be interesting to see how California's approach to this problem plays out. We have had local regulations and NIMBY groups forestall new construction/denser housing, but the state pushed through legislation to forcibly override those local blockers. Incentives should now be aligned for builders to build, but local homeowners will continue to fight against it because their incentives are not aligned.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  California is also facing a net reduction in population in the past few years (around half a million total - that counts births, deaths, people moving in, people moving out - the state's absolute population has gone down the past two years). Eventually, problems do solve themselves. One way or another. It just may not be in the desired way.
  - prottog 3y ago
    > Eventually, problems do solve themselves. One way or another. As Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead. It would be nice to solve some of these problems within our lifetimes.
  - scythe 3y ago
    LA (metro) saw a decadal growth of just 2.9% — total — from 2010 to 2020. That's less than half the national average, and well below many cheap cities. Zoom out to the combined statistical area (including SB/Riverside) and it only goes up to 4.2%. Yet it hasn't gotten significantly cheaper. Stopping growth does not imply achieving affordability on a reasonable timescale. Over several decades, maybe. But letting pain solve problems usually requires more than people realize it will take.
Syonyk 3y ago
A reasonable question, and one not terribly often asked, is "What is the point of the economy, growth, etc?" Is it to serve human health, happiness, prosperity... or is it to just grow for the sake of "numbers go up"? Is the economy made for man, or man for the economy? We (collectively, western, industrial, etc) are trapped in the "growth" thinking - the way out of any problem is to grow out of it, which works fairly well until you start hitting the problems caused by growth - which, I'd argue, we are now facing. Carbon emissions, general "stripping large parts of the planet for the mineral goodies under it," etc. And, of course, we've ended up in a debt-based economy that works great, until growth slows down. It's going to be an interesting ride, and the best suggestions I've seen are to simply get ahead of the curve, and figure out how to live on LESS (Less Energy, Simulation, and Stuff) now, while we still have the resources to make mistakes and figure out the details - because that lower energy future (or, at least, more limits on energy, growth, etc) is coming down the tunnel at a good clip. I deal with it regularly, since my office is a standalone, off grid power system. I just use less energy, by an order of magnitude or so, in the winter - and I bundle up out here.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  You believe in a consumer driven solution?
  - Syonyk 3y ago
    I can hope for a mass change (reduction) in energy use, consumption, etc, driven by consumers - though I don't believe it's likely to happen until the issue is forced by something like "unavailability of resources compared to income" - as we're seeing right now in various ways. I fully expect us as a society to hit the various walls at speed, and have to find some way to do something useful with the various pieces remaining. But, given that, "working out the useful things one can do beforehand" is useful - because you can afford to screw up, to learn what works well locally, and have the resources to experiment. I'll point to things like "direct solar heating of homes" (solar thermal air collectors) as the sort of thing that take some learning how to build and use effectively, and it's useful to work that out while Home Depot still is tolerably well stocked. And/or to collect supplies ahead of time. I'm aware it's a pessimistic view, but it's been working just fine for modeling reality.
Vecr 3y ago
I think this makes sense, maintaining your country (and humanity as a whole) even at its current state is very hard. Things get worse unless you fix them.
- prottog 3y ago
  > Things get worse unless you fix them. This is called entropy. All things towards tend toward disorder unless energy is applied upon. Insofar as degrowth advocates want to limit humanity's harnessing of energy, I find it very difficult to support their position.
peepeepoopoo5 3y ago
Degrowth is a euphemism for economic recession/depression.
- green_man_lives 3y ago
  I think that what people mean, or think they mean, when they say "de-growth" is switching from pure GDP as a metric of standard of living, to a normalized GDP-per capita. Probably GDP per capita divided by hours of labor and also negative externalities like pollution and stuff. The idea here is that GDP should rise from a rise in productivity, rather than relying on an increase in population or working hours or increased environmental exploitation to achieve growth. It's annoyingly used in the case of this article to point to economic stagnation and say "look here's the de-growth you wanted". When the whole point is that GDP should be increasing, just not at the expense of the citizens or the planet.
  - peepeepoopoo5 3y ago
    GDP per capita would effectively give you the same metric, unless you're also implying that we need to cull the human population.
    - green_man_lives 3y ago
      > GDP per capita would effectively give you the same metric My point is that GDP per capita can increase because of reasons that don't necessarily make your life better. Working longer hours, or even an increase in productivity with a simultaneous increase in inequality, meaning that the per-capita GDP is increasing but income is stagnating. > unless you're also implying that we need to cull the human population. My point in bringing up population was that our GDP growth can be attributed to population growth, which is likely going to be a logistic curve. So we can't rely on population growth to contribute to GDP.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    In contexts where living standards are important, we already talk about stuff like productivity, dollars-per-worker-hour and stuff like that. And in contexts where absolute GDP is important, like international relations, we talk about that instead.
jasmer 3y ago
Interesting but there isn't necessarily a hard link between lack of growth and these issues. The West has a demographic problem, that could be hitting hard and I'm not saying it explains everything, but it's a significant enough issue that it could basically be the whole thing. China is selling us a ton of stuff very cheaply, which reducees jobs and profits in the West, but does provide surpluses that we don't measure. I mean, just look at photos from 30 years ago: we have way more selection of clothes, electronics. We love our apps and mobile phones. Those are distinctly valuable, but not very profitible on the books. Definitely there has been a lack of growth and foundation of new industry, and that should be a concern. For those wondering, GDP matters because wealth tends to make a lot of problems go away. Go to a poor country - they have garbage healthcare because they can't afford it it's that simple. Obviously money is not everything but it's definitely a thing.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  > We love our apps and mobile phones. We collectively spend a lot of time staring at them, for sure. That the best paid minds of our time have set themselves to finding ways to "improve engagement" endlessly in various ways and dark patterns probably has a lot to do with that, and I'm far from certain that it's good for human... anything, really. Health, sanity, happiness, the works. We've been told that "social media" (which is what a lot of the staring at phone involves) connects us, but study after study demonstrates the exact opposite - that it atomizes us and alienates us, with plenty of follow on impacts on happiness, contentedness, etc. It's a great gig, make people unhappy and then sell their eyeballs to people who want to the sell them the solutions to that problem, but let's not pretend it's more than just seeking more money. There is certainly a range of things that can be done with more money to spend on a society, but American healthcare being "staggeringly expensive" doesn't also mean it's "the best."
- maxerickson 3y ago
  Buying a ton of stuff from China isn't necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the details. Things like specialization can be beneficial for everyone. And the demographics in China are arguably more challenging than in the US (and the US is probably better positioned to address the challenges via immigration).
aeturnum 3y ago
I'm not a de-growther and I also think people are reasonably worried about structuring things in such a way that future expansion is assumed. Of course you can do it for a while, but it seems very possible we're coming up on the end of a while (or did 20 years ago, etc). I agree that our political undercurrents suggest an inchoate inability to actually change things. Stuffs all fucked up - for lack of a better way of putting it - and we don't know how to get into a sustainable situation. We've gotten by on growth for years because we could, and now we have to actually figure it out.
renewiltord 3y ago
It is quite obvious what's going on: so-called protectors of the environment and of peoples' rights can now be judged by their actions. The Democratic Socialists of America's primary achievement is blocking building of homes so that golf courses can be preserved. The Sierra Club's primary achievement is ensuring urban sprawl. Burning Man's primary lasting achievement is the stalling of geothermal power. POSIWID. The Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea is not judged by its name but by its actions. So be it for the environmentalists and their ilk. If you fail at X and succeed at not X, you're a Not X organization. Sure, I know I know it's the corporations. But you did act as well, and you always succeeded at not X and failed at X. That makes you a Not X Organization. What you win at is what you are.
627467 3y ago
Similar to climate apocalyptic fanatics this degrowth-lovers camp have also taken their doctrine too seriously and failed to see how their discourse of doom and gloom have not and will not take them and humanity very far in persuit of a better future. I mean, every authoritarian knows that urgency, spartanism and desperation only lasts so long in aligning people towards common causes.
Turskarama 3y ago
I think the author here has made one big mistake here though: there are multiple ways that economic growth can stall. Sure, it could be caused by policies pushing money from growth into more sustainable and socially conscious policies, but I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence of this. I suspect the real reason is simply that the economy has pivoted away from innovation and production and into rent seeking. I see quite a lot of evidence of this, one of the biggest being the increasing focus on property investment (existing property rather than construction) and ponzi schemes like crypto. The degrowth we are seeing isn't due to any deliberate push for degrowth, it's just capitalism eating itself.
derbOac 3y ago
This was interesting and thought-provoking, but has a sort of strawman quality to it to me, or obfuscates a debate in a way that seems unproductive. I might even go so far as to say it seems like it's arguing in bad faith, but I'm not sure I entirely believe that. It seems to conflate different forms of degrowth, and assumes whatever is happening in the UK recently is the same sort of thing that's always being discussed when degrowth is discussed. Increasing trade barriers and regulation while holding population constant might result in economic degrowth, but it doesn't necessarily track population degrowth in a healthy or productive way. I do think that it's interesting to think about some of the questions being raised, but the arguments seem to do a disservice to rigorous discussion of degrowth and the development of solutions to population dilemmas.
- epistasis 3y ago
  One of the big problems with "degrowth" is this very conflation of many definitions, with advocates unwilling to speak clearly on the matter. I find the entire movement incoherent at best, and completely unconvincing in their style of communication. It appears to use vague definitions and abstractions around very complex and multi factorial issues, and then apply simplistic linear reasoning on top of these leaky abstractions. If I ever meet a degrowth advocate that can speak with nuance and clarity and can respond to questions enough to allow dialogue, I will be very surprised, and pleased.
goodpoint 3y ago
The article is full of logical fallacies and mental gymnastic.

79 points by jseliger 3y ago

> So why is it hard to decarbonise our energy systems? The rules against wind turbines and solar farms weren’t lobbied for by top-hatted capitalists, but by campaigners who think of themselves as protectors of England’s green and pleasant land: not BP and Shell, but the CPRE and the RSPB and countless local groups, and politicians seeking to accommodate them. The combination of smugness and gaslighting makes me genuinely angry.

epistasis 3y ago
I'm not sure if you're accusing the author or the subjects of this paragraph of smugness and gaslighting.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  The author. I genuinely didn't expect the next phase of climate change denial to be trying to rewrite history to blame environmentalists for stopping progress.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    Blaming the messenger has been standard practice for a long time.
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      Specifically highlighting Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch as people not responsible for climate denial is so aggressively egregious it taints everything else these "roots of progress" folk are advocating.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        I don't understand your assertion of gaslighting or smugness, honestly. Koch and Murdoch do not enter into the point he is making, and neither does the standard climate denialism that these two devils have perpetrated on so much of the population. Instead, the accusation is that ostensibly "environmental" groups are prioritizing "human enjoyment of green environments" over actual ecosystem preservation and climate action. This is a trend for all the environmental groups that have not updated strategy since the 1970s. Preserving our current economy, our current system, means certain ecocide. Yet these groups are entirely set up to preserve the status quo, rather than accelerating drastic change to the economy and human systems. In my local town, this manifests as aged people advocating to stop the construction of a building that could house 100 people, because 3 urban trees would be cut down, while at the same time accepting that those 100 people will not be putting pressure on housing in further away, more sensitive areas, where housing will result in hundreds of trees being cut down. In short, they are preserving their view, preserving existing human structures, instead of allowing the needs to humans to be met with the lowest environmental impact. This is also manifesting as people blocking newel student housing on campus, using "environmental" laws, even though the result is that these same students must now commute long distances at much much higher environments costs than being able to live on campus. Perhaps the CPRE and RSPB are different than what's going on in the US. But here in the US, the backwards "environmental groups cause more damage locally than even Murdoch or Koch, and do it hypocritically. To me, this makes them villains greater than Koch and Murdoch, at least in local action.

green_man_lives 3y ago

[flagged]

Jtsummers 3y ago
From the guidelines: > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, it's got a whopping 10 upvotes (at the time of your comment). Pretty poor astroturfing it is.
- green_man_lives 3y ago
  My bad

coderintherye 3y ago

I like the author's approach, as this problem really comes down to one of various interest groups and their interests and incentives. In the U.S., we subsidize home ownership through mortgage interest tax breaks and various other legislation and we treat homes as investments. Naturally then, most homeowners will want to continue to push for anything that increases the value of that investment and oppose anything that decreases it (e.g. building more housing). It will be interesting to see how California's approach to this problem plays out. We have had local regulations and NIMBY groups forestall new construction/denser housing, but the state pushed through legislation to forcibly override those local blockers. Incentives should now be aligned for builders to build, but local homeowners will continue to fight against it because their incentives are not aligned.

Syonyk 3y ago
California is also facing a net reduction in population in the past few years (around half a million total - that counts births, deaths, people moving in, people moving out - the state's absolute population has gone down the past two years). Eventually, problems do solve themselves. One way or another. It just may not be in the desired way.
- prottog 3y ago
  > Eventually, problems do solve themselves. One way or another. As Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead. It would be nice to solve some of these problems within our lifetimes.
- scythe 3y ago
  LA (metro) saw a decadal growth of just 2.9% — total — from 2010 to 2020. That's less than half the national average, and well below many cheap cities. Zoom out to the combined statistical area (including SB/Riverside) and it only goes up to 4.2%. Yet it hasn't gotten significantly cheaper. Stopping growth does not imply achieving affordability on a reasonable timescale. Over several decades, maybe. But letting pain solve problems usually requires more than people realize it will take.

Syonyk 3y ago

A reasonable question, and one not terribly often asked, is "What is the point of the economy, growth, etc?" Is it to serve human health, happiness, prosperity... or is it to just grow for the sake of "numbers go up"? Is the economy made for man, or man for the economy? We (collectively, western, industrial, etc) are trapped in the "growth" thinking - the way out of any problem is to grow out of it, which works fairly well until you start hitting the problems caused by growth - which, I'd argue, we are now facing. Carbon emissions, general "stripping large parts of the planet for the mineral goodies under it," etc. And, of course, we've ended up in a debt-based economy that works great, until growth slows down. It's going to be an interesting ride, and the best suggestions I've seen are to simply get ahead of the curve, and figure out how to live on LESS (Less Energy, Simulation, and Stuff) now, while we still have the resources to make mistakes and figure out the details - because that lower energy future (or, at least, more limits on energy, growth, etc) is coming down the tunnel at a good clip. I deal with it regularly, since my office is a standalone, off grid power system. I just use less energy, by an order of magnitude or so, in the winter - and I bundle up out here.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
You believe in a consumer driven solution?
- Syonyk 3y ago
  I can hope for a mass change (reduction) in energy use, consumption, etc, driven by consumers - though I don't believe it's likely to happen until the issue is forced by something like "unavailability of resources compared to income" - as we're seeing right now in various ways. I fully expect us as a society to hit the various walls at speed, and have to find some way to do something useful with the various pieces remaining. But, given that, "working out the useful things one can do beforehand" is useful - because you can afford to screw up, to learn what works well locally, and have the resources to experiment. I'll point to things like "direct solar heating of homes" (solar thermal air collectors) as the sort of thing that take some learning how to build and use effectively, and it's useful to work that out while Home Depot still is tolerably well stocked. And/or to collect supplies ahead of time. I'm aware it's a pessimistic view, but it's been working just fine for modeling reality.

Vecr 3y ago

I think this makes sense, maintaining your country (and humanity as a whole) even at its current state is very hard. Things get worse unless you fix them.

prottog 3y ago
> Things get worse unless you fix them. This is called entropy. All things towards tend toward disorder unless energy is applied upon. Insofar as degrowth advocates want to limit humanity's harnessing of energy, I find it very difficult to support their position.

peepeepoopoo5 3y ago

Degrowth is a euphemism for economic recession/depression.

green_man_lives 3y ago
I think that what people mean, or think they mean, when they say "de-growth" is switching from pure GDP as a metric of standard of living, to a normalized GDP-per capita. Probably GDP per capita divided by hours of labor and also negative externalities like pollution and stuff. The idea here is that GDP should rise from a rise in productivity, rather than relying on an increase in population or working hours or increased environmental exploitation to achieve growth. It's annoyingly used in the case of this article to point to economic stagnation and say "look here's the de-growth you wanted". When the whole point is that GDP should be increasing, just not at the expense of the citizens or the planet.
- peepeepoopoo5 3y ago
  GDP per capita would effectively give you the same metric, unless you're also implying that we need to cull the human population.
  - green_man_lives 3y ago
    > GDP per capita would effectively give you the same metric My point is that GDP per capita can increase because of reasons that don't necessarily make your life better. Working longer hours, or even an increase in productivity with a simultaneous increase in inequality, meaning that the per-capita GDP is increasing but income is stagnating. > unless you're also implying that we need to cull the human population. My point in bringing up population was that our GDP growth can be attributed to population growth, which is likely going to be a logistic curve. So we can't rely on population growth to contribute to GDP.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  In contexts where living standards are important, we already talk about stuff like productivity, dollars-per-worker-hour and stuff like that. And in contexts where absolute GDP is important, like international relations, we talk about that instead.

jasmer 3y ago

Interesting but there isn't necessarily a hard link between lack of growth and these issues. The West has a demographic problem, that could be hitting hard and I'm not saying it explains everything, but it's a significant enough issue that it could basically be the whole thing. China is selling us a ton of stuff very cheaply, which reducees jobs and profits in the West, but does provide surpluses that we don't measure. I mean, just look at photos from 30 years ago: we have way more selection of clothes, electronics. We love our apps and mobile phones. Those are distinctly valuable, but not very profitible on the books. Definitely there has been a lack of growth and foundation of new industry, and that should be a concern. For those wondering, GDP matters because wealth tends to make a lot of problems go away. Go to a poor country - they have garbage healthcare because they can't afford it it's that simple. Obviously money is not everything but it's definitely a thing.

Syonyk 3y ago
> We love our apps and mobile phones. We collectively spend a lot of time staring at them, for sure. That the best paid minds of our time have set themselves to finding ways to "improve engagement" endlessly in various ways and dark patterns probably has a lot to do with that, and I'm far from certain that it's good for human... anything, really. Health, sanity, happiness, the works. We've been told that "social media" (which is what a lot of the staring at phone involves) connects us, but study after study demonstrates the exact opposite - that it atomizes us and alienates us, with plenty of follow on impacts on happiness, contentedness, etc. It's a great gig, make people unhappy and then sell their eyeballs to people who want to the sell them the solutions to that problem, but let's not pretend it's more than just seeking more money. There is certainly a range of things that can be done with more money to spend on a society, but American healthcare being "staggeringly expensive" doesn't also mean it's "the best."
maxerickson 3y ago
Buying a ton of stuff from China isn't necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the details. Things like specialization can be beneficial for everyone. And the demographics in China are arguably more challenging than in the US (and the US is probably better positioned to address the challenges via immigration).

aeturnum 3y ago

I'm not a de-growther and I also think people are reasonably worried about structuring things in such a way that future expansion is assumed. Of course you can do it for a while, but it seems very possible we're coming up on the end of a while (or did 20 years ago, etc). I agree that our political undercurrents suggest an inchoate inability to actually change things. Stuffs all fucked up - for lack of a better way of putting it - and we don't know how to get into a sustainable situation. We've gotten by on growth for years because we could, and now we have to actually figure it out.

renewiltord 3y ago

It is quite obvious what's going on: so-called protectors of the environment and of peoples' rights can now be judged by their actions. The Democratic Socialists of America's primary achievement is blocking building of homes so that golf courses can be preserved. The Sierra Club's primary achievement is ensuring urban sprawl. Burning Man's primary lasting achievement is the stalling of geothermal power. POSIWID. The Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea is not judged by its name but by its actions. So be it for the environmentalists and their ilk. If you fail at X and succeed at not X, you're a Not X organization. Sure, I know I know it's the corporations. But you did act as well, and you always succeeded at not X and failed at X. That makes you a Not X Organization. What you win at is what you are.

627467 3y ago

Similar to climate apocalyptic fanatics this degrowth-lovers camp have also taken their doctrine too seriously and failed to see how their discourse of doom and gloom have not and will not take them and humanity very far in persuit of a better future. I mean, every authoritarian knows that urgency, spartanism and desperation only lasts so long in aligning people towards common causes.

Turskarama 3y ago

I think the author here has made one big mistake here though: there are multiple ways that economic growth can stall. Sure, it could be caused by policies pushing money from growth into more sustainable and socially conscious policies, but I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence of this. I suspect the real reason is simply that the economy has pivoted away from innovation and production and into rent seeking. I see quite a lot of evidence of this, one of the biggest being the increasing focus on property investment (existing property rather than construction) and ponzi schemes like crypto. The degrowth we are seeing isn't due to any deliberate push for degrowth, it's just capitalism eating itself.

derbOac 3y ago

This was interesting and thought-provoking, but has a sort of strawman quality to it to me, or obfuscates a debate in a way that seems unproductive. I might even go so far as to say it seems like it's arguing in bad faith, but I'm not sure I entirely believe that. It seems to conflate different forms of degrowth, and assumes whatever is happening in the UK recently is the same sort of thing that's always being discussed when degrowth is discussed. Increasing trade barriers and regulation while holding population constant might result in economic degrowth, but it doesn't necessarily track population degrowth in a healthy or productive way. I do think that it's interesting to think about some of the questions being raised, but the arguments seem to do a disservice to rigorous discussion of degrowth and the development of solutions to population dilemmas.

epistasis 3y ago
One of the big problems with "degrowth" is this very conflation of many definitions, with advocates unwilling to speak clearly on the matter. I find the entire movement incoherent at best, and completely unconvincing in their style of communication. It appears to use vague definitions and abstractions around very complex and multi factorial issues, and then apply simplistic linear reasoning on top of these leaky abstractions. If I ever meet a degrowth advocate that can speak with nuance and clarity and can respond to questions enough to allow dialogue, I will be very surprised, and pleased.

goodpoint 3y ago

The article is full of logical fallacies and mental gymnastic.