6 ms·

Shrinking the economy won't save the planet

56 points by apsec112 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
josefritzishere 2y ago
There's an unspoken fallacy here. The case for degrowth is imperfect, but it's better than the case for infinite growth, which is effectively the current paradigm.
- coreyh14444 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans
  - supportengineer 2y ago
    I haven't read this book but I hope they came to the conclusion that this cannot be done without a huge expansion of the rail network.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  What about a third option, where we neither grow nor shrink? False dichotomies, anyone?
  - randomdata 2y ago
    A system without at least some noise is effectively impossible. A system of this complexity is bound to have quite a lot of noise to contend with.
    - tempfile 2y ago
      Neither grow nor shrink on average - it's quite possible for a noisy system to be stable.
      - randomdata 2y ago
        By that token, as far as we know the system has always been stable, only that not enough datapoints to overcome the noise have been observed yet. What we are observing being anything other than noise is highly unlikely.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    It's a false dichotomy. But also, we need to gain efficiency, and quickly. That constitutes as growth. The degrowth ideas don't differentiate what kind of growth they are fighting, neither does targeting neutral growth. You can't target a single number that accurately, we need a details-based intervention.
- dijit 2y ago
  With the risk of wading into very controversial political territory. I think it's incredible that people have been told for 2 decades that the number of humans that exist is too many, that people should not have kids (it's so hard!, and expensive, treat yourself!), and so forth. But on the other hand, our society is designed in a way that: if it's not growing; it's disasterous. Which meant that our societies, thinking short-term as they do: turned to migration. Which can be quite unpopular and lead to civil unrest. IF having children is bad for the environment, why don't we just plan to shrink our economies? I know I sound naive but it's absurd to me that we don't make plans to have a shrinking population if obstensibly that's what we have to do as humanity to survive. Importing people is the worst kind of band-aid, it's totally unsustainable! And we still tell people not to have kids.
  - danbruc 2y ago
    But on the other hand, our society is designed in a way that: if it's not growing; it's disasterous. Why? We could all just forever keep doing what we are doing today, nothing bad would happen. With a few caveats. We are depleting non-renewable resources and the population size is changing, that would eventually cause problems if not addressed. Also living standards are very unequal, in reality you could not convince the poorer people to not try to become richer.
- randomdata 2y ago
  Infinite growth is the best way to save the planet, enabling its fever to continue to rise unabated until the infection is killed off. Degrowth is apt to hinder the planet's defence mechanisms, prolonging the infection. But perhaps the planet isn't actually what we want to save, contrary to the headline?
- danbruc 2y ago
  Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever? As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really [...] You can almost certainly solve climate change with degrowth, the plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles, it is just a question of how much we have to give up. But the not really part is the important one, you are not going to convince people to reduce their living standards significantly. If the required amount of degrowth means going back to the living standard from a couple of decades ago or more, that is not going to happen before the surface of the Earth is a deserted wasteland and people really feel the need. I guess the best you can do is maintaining the current living standard and put future growth into making that living standard less environmental impactful instead of further raising the living standard.
  - agentultra 2y ago
    I’ve heard one claim that we could bring all 8.5 billion of us to the living standard of a middle class American in the 1960’s and still reduce the size of our economic footprint to fit within sustainable boundaries for a healthy planet. Not sure if that’s true. The claim is that wealth inequality and standards of living are not distributed evenly. A very small percentage of people on Earth emit much more carbon than the rest. Enough of a difference, perhaps, that the argument that we’d all be living in stone huts is a bit ridiculous if we were to focus on degrowth. What I find hard to digest about all of this is that the foundations of economics is based on a lot of shady hand-waving and pontificating. How we base our society and planning for our future on such a weak discipline is tiring.
    - danbruc 2y ago
      You are not going to convince people to go back to the 1960s. But I think that is also the wrong way of looking at it, just going back in time would be stupid. We have made advancements, for example houses and cars consuming less energy, it would make no sense to go back to the old technology. So you could probably have a larger house than you had in the 1960s while still having the same environmental footprint. Or did they already factor that in, you need 1950s energy consumption and with current technology that buys you 1960s stuff? One would really have to carefully analyze what you can fit into the available footprint with current technology. Maybe you only get two plane trips during your lifetime, that is one of the first things that comes to mind that people did a lot less in the past, travelling. But the would of course cause ripple effects and it could be really hard to predict the effects.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  What do you mean by "infinite"? Can we keep growing by a few percentage points a year for the next few centuries? Yeah, probably. Can we do that until the heat death of the universe and beyond? Probably not. Stuff gets weird when you include "infinity".
  - tzs 2y ago
    > Can we keep growing by a few percentage points a year for the next few centuries? Yeah, probably 2 percent a year for 200 years (the minimum rate and years that could count as a few) is a multiplier or around 52. For population that would give about 400 billion. > Can we do that until the heat death of the universe and beyond? Probably not. For population and energy we hit severe physical limits long before that. At 1% annual growth in population in 12000 years we run out room. What I mean by "run out of room" is that assuming no FTL travel then since every human right now is on Earth or in low Earth orbit no human 12000 years from now can be more than 12000 light years from Earth. The volume of a sphere 12000 light years in radius, divided by the population after 12000 years of 1% growth, is less than the volume of a human. How about energy? 9300 years of 1% annual energy growth starting now reaches a level where our annual consumption equals the energy of the entire Milky Way galaxy. By "energy of the entire Milky Way" mean everything...electromagnetic radiation, gravitational potential energy, the E=mc^2 energy of everything that has mass. If we can somehow actually do that, 2700 more years of 1% annual energy growth and we are annually consuming the entire energy of the observable universe. Its similar when you look at the mass to make human bodies. Here's what 1% annual population growth looks like in terms of mass needed: 3400 years to where the mass of human bodies equals the total mass of Earth and Moon. 600 more years and we also need Jupiter's mass. 700 more and we need the mass of the whole solar system. Then it is another 2000 before we need the mass of the entire Milky way. 100 more years and we need the Andromeda galaxy's mass too. That's 6800 years from now. Then it is 5500 years until all mass in the observable universe is needed for human bodies. Unless we get FTL travel it seems pretty clear than sometime in the next 12000 years either growth must slow or we have to change humans to require a lot less space, mass, and energy.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  As far as "doesn't solve any of the problems, stops any of the solutions people are implanting right now from working, and makes sure nobody will try to solve the problem on the foreseeable future" qualifies as an "imperfect" solution. But yeah, "this thing is wrong, so we must do that other wrong thing instead" is a great talking point.
Circlecrypto2 2y ago
It's definitely not something any politician can back. There's no good way to spin that.
coreyh14444 2y ago
a) Nice to see this from Vox. More left-leaning readers need to hear this message. b) Look at a country like Norway. One of the wealthiest countries in the world (due to oil!) and they invest heavily in renewable energy and have the highest percentage of electric new car sales in the world.
- ivann 2y ago
  a) You only get this message if you stop at the title. The rest of the article is not a criticism of degrowth but a criticism of it's academic literature. b) At 12.6 tCO2eq/cap/year [0] I would not call this a success. [0] https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2023?vis=ghgpop#emissions_table https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2023?vis=ghgpop#emissi...
- dopylitty 2y ago
  Vox is not “left leaning”. It’s funded by right wing businesses like comcast[0] and constantly puts out right wing concern trolling like this piece and the other examples cited here.[1] 0: https://fair.org/home/comcast-owned-vox-explains-the-great-deal-youre-getting-from-comcast/ https://fair.org/home/comcast-owned-vox-explains-the-great-d... 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=citations+needed+vox+site%3A+medium.com https://www.google.com/search?q=citations+needed+vox+site%3A...
niek_pas 2y ago
The caption to this article states, “561 research papers in, the case for degrowth is still weak”, but the rest of the article seems to be not so much a criticism of degrowth, but rather a criticism of academic degrowth literature —- based on a single literature review.
- boxed 2y ago
  I would argue that academic degrowth literature is the best of degrowth thinking.
- ch71r22 2y ago
  Yeah, the article argues that degrowth doesn't have enough evidence and isn't progressing towards it fast enough. Valid, but that doesn't make me feel like the idea of degrowth is invalid. They say that degrowth ideas would do "approximately nothing," but then their own article they link to states that "a shift toward plant-rich diets would do more than any other single change" to reduce emissions. They bash on eating local, but the academic paper they cite concludes "eating locally grown fruits and vegetables may be an effective strategy to meaningfully reduce food system GHGEs from transportation."
cen4 2y ago
Just have to measure things differently. GDP grows even if someone profits while producing sewage, cause someone else profits from clean up. If you call both Growth naturally DeGrowth doesn't make sense. Take the Attention Economy which is HN is a micro example off. People's finite Attention is being pulled and pushed here and there, traded, captured or stolen. But the only thing that get measured is Growth in views or ycombinators net worth.
- sneed_chucker 2y ago
  Right. In the modern economy we have a bunch of pothole digging industries and a bunch of pothole filling industries, and the operation of both causes the GDP to go up.
  - cassianoleal 2y ago
    Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit. The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit. They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit. Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing." "That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!" https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/qp49wz/two_economists_are_walking_in_a_forest_when_they/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/qp49wz/two_economist...
- nradov 2y ago
  Things are already measured differently, and always have been. Economists and policymakers have never really focused on maximizing GDP. They are fully aware that voters, lobbyists, and campaign contributors don't care about GDP as an abstract metric.
- mlsu 2y ago
  I prefer total energy use as a measure of human progress. At the end of the day, money is a proxy for energy consumption. By people in their labor, by machines, by the processing of information. Fortunately, it is steadily increasing.
mxfh 2y ago
PV is dirt cheap, battery materials are cheap and exist in abundance. All that's limited is the ROI for fossil industries, and they will fight tooth and nail to get the most out of their investments. Most importantly degrowth is a loosing position in the popularity contest, that is democracy. Selling carbon net neutral to negative ways of hedonism are the only way out.
- chasd00 2y ago
  Does "negative hedonism" mean suffering? that's a hard sell.
  - NeutralCrane 2y ago
    They don’t mean “negative hedonism”, they mean “carbon-neutral or carbon-negative hedonism”. In other words, people are going to chose hedonism, comfort, fun, and consumption no matter what, so the only way to achieve these goals is to make hedonism carbon-neutral/negative.
  - vinyl7 2y ago
    I would take it as a return to community/family focus instead of selfish individualism
  - realce 2y ago
    IMO a great example is that it means not building floating skyscrapers powered by diesel fuel so that people can shop at a mall in the middle of the ocean.
  - rybosome 2y ago
    I take it to mean less pleasure, which I suppose is a form of suffering. I don’t follow the logic of the comment you’re replying to that degrowth would be a hard sell to a democracy, but reducing comfort and pleasure wouldn’t.
  - mxfh 2y ago
    Hehe, yeah clarified that. Meant more things like lifting speed limits on Autobahns and other highways for EVs during excess energy renewable energy windows. Or effectively from May until October in Europe.
samvher 2y ago
What a terrible title for the content of the article. Only the first few paragraphs provide some support of it, but not directly but rather through linking out. Of course setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal isn't going to do much good. But "shrinking parts of the economy" might be necessary for a safe and healthy future. And whether the parts that don't need to be shrunk will still provide enough growth to end up with overall economic growth is hard to say (i.e. a safe and healthy future might require some sacrifices compared to the status quo). Oversimplifying, growth can come from increasing the resources you use or the efficiency with which you use them. The former might not be something that we can keep doing at the current rate (and we might need to reduce some resource usage). The latter is pretty much a pure win. Similarly, aggregate growth can come from hypergrowth in a small part of an otherwise stagnant population. And aggregate degrowth can come from modest growth in part of the population and shrinkage in another part. So just setting "aggregate growth" as your target is just as naive as setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal as it might not have the results we collectively want.
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  Modern economy has become too complex and stupid at the same time. There are layers upon layers that contribute nothing to it, yet somehow inflate the valuation, and burst from time to time, while a few take full advantage of it. I think it should be possible to radically simplify taxation and law, with the goal of maximizing productivity and minimizing parasitism. The economy would shrink in numbers, but quality of life should generally improve. Bonus points if population growth is not encouraged, but is allowed to find a lower equilibrium. The global economy shouldn't work like a Ponzi scheme.
hedora 2y ago
Usually, growth comes from increased efficiency, and increased efficiency usually results in lower environmental impact. I don’t get how the degrowth movement can seriously argue that blocking that sort of progress would help the planet. Instead, we should price in environmental externalities whenever possible. E.g., want to manufacture plastic? Great. Recycle at least as much post consumer waste into feedstock equivalent to what you shipped, and also use atmospheric carbon capture to bring your net co2 emissions to zero, pay to clean up the air pollution, etc. Of course, doing that would create GDP growth, and also require a growth in our energy supply.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- monkaiju 2y ago
  > Usually, growth comes from increased efficiency, and increased efficiency usually results in lower environmental impact. This is in fact very commonly not the case, to the point that its a standalone concept in Economics called Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- rob74 2y ago
  Well, the same "political poison" argument that the article advances against "degrowth" can also be applied to your proposal (or any other proposal that benefits the environment): if they are followed, plastic gets more expensive, and all opposition parties will blame you for making people poorer because they now have to pay more for every single product packaged in plastic (conveniently ignoring of course that there are other ways to package products). The sad truth is that the environment doesn't vote in elections, people do, and people are generally selfish...
- nicoburns 2y ago
  I don't think many people are arguing against increased efficiency. They're arguing against growth-without-caveats-or-nuance as a goal. Which might seem like something one shouldn't have to argue against, but it has been a key part of the mainstream political ideology for the last few decades.
itishappy 2y ago
> Is degrowth just the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or is it the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability? That's a great question. In my mind the great question. I have not encountered much degrowth sentiment online, it seems largely to be anti-growth-at-all-costs sentiment (the former of the two questions). The article appears to assume and argue against the latter.
- sumuyuda 2y ago
  I think the degrowth discussion is not anti-growth at all costs, but reducing damaging and wasteful production and instead focusing on production that provides social good for humans. See this podcast: https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshape_technology_w_jason_hickel https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshap...
  - cholantesh 2y ago
    There's also an episode on effective altruism, which the author is a proponent of, which is pretty important in casting light on this frame of analysis.
    - sumuyuda 2y ago
      Do you have a link to the episode?
      - cholantesh 2y ago
        To clarify it's actually been talked about a few times, but with specific focus on substrands/topics in EA. Here are two that I'm aware of: https://techwontsave.us/episode/198_how_effective_accelerationism_divides_silicon_valley_w_emile_torres https://techwontsave.us/episode/198_how_effective_accelerati... https://techwontsave.us/episode/138_dont_fall_for_the_longtermism_sales_pitch_w_emile_p_torres https://techwontsave.us/episode/138_dont_fall_for_the_longte...
uludag 2y ago
> Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet Interesting choice of headline for the article. Maybe a better one would be "Metatudy notes degrowth studies' methodologies lacking."
mihaic 2y ago
This is a type of discussion where I'm always infuriated that I have to use the wrong terms to describe both the problem and potential solutions. Being forced to choose in terms of "growth" or "degrowth" reduces everything to GDP-centric thinking. Simply making people poor to cut down on 5% of emissions is just like banning plastic straws but allowing plastic cups. Realizing as well that constant economic growth is impossible in the long term is required so we start figuring out a more sustainable system. I'm pretty sure quality of life can be improved even if the GDP shrinks, but it needs to be put as a primary target. At the same time, as an EU citized, the fact that shipping a product from the Netherlands is twice as expensive as a product with free shipping from Temu means that we've got low hanging fruits that can be instantly tackled, but nobody is interested in cost/benefit analysis but only in optics of elections.
caust1c 2y ago
I've done a lot of thinking and reading on this subject, as I'm sure many other HN readers have. I've come to the same conclusion as the Vox article. I haven't found any compelling argument for how or why degrowth specifically would work. Sure, I think it's toxic that individuals and corporations pursue growth at all costs, but currency is fundamentally a tool created to resolve debts and for that to work effectively must come with some incentives for allocation and payback. Capitalism has brought the entire world out of poverty and enabled massive innovation at a global scale before most modern technology as we know it. It's the most efficient way to allocate needed resources as far as I can tell. What I do think is urgently needed are 2 things: 1. Some way to incentivize local spending over global spending, and it's probably not tariffs due to easy loopholes and negative externalities. People have started to do this of their own accord because we can sense it is right and more just. 2. Find better, more general ways to encourage competition and prevent anticompetitive behavior in markets. Everyone here knows how much more efficient small groups of people can be relative to large organizations. How can we make anticompetitive behavior and market dominance harder in the general sense? There aren't easy answers to these two problems, but it sure as hell isn't total deregulation with laissez-faire capitalism and it sure as hell isn't centralized planned economies and communism. It's obviously somewhere in between.
kragen 2y ago
when i read this, i didn't think kelsey's description of what degrowth is was accurate as i understand it, the degrowth position is not, as she says, either 'the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or (...) the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability'. rather, the degrowth position is that people are inevitably going to lead worse lives than at present, but that we can choose between things getting kind of bad, by systematically pursuing degrowth, and things getting apocalyptically bad, which is what will happen if we continue pursuing growth i think this position is wrong, but that's my understanding of what degrowth advocates are promoting specifically they argue that continued economic growth, or even continued economic activity at current levels, will unavoidably destroy the natural environment, and that that destruction will diminish the human standard of living in ways that no economic prosperity can replace; you can't compensate for widespread desertification and pervasive environmental endocrine disruptors with products you can buy. going for a walk in the park without needing a respirator cannot be replaced with visits to disneyland; the opportunity to have children of your own cannot be replaced with tasty vat meat however, i have to admit that wikipedia's summary of degrowth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth is closer to theunitofcaring's in this article. and check out this abstract of the opening keynote at last year's degrowth conference in zagreb, by diana ürge-vorsatz, who is apparently the vice-chair of ipcc working group iii (mitigation): > It was in 2022 when the IPCC first mentioned Degrowth and sufficiency in its reports. It is a significant move considering that most IPCC member states still struggle from meeting basic human needs. However, there are many sections in IPCC products that indicate that growth imperatives make meeting ambitious climate goals extremely challenging or risky. An important risk is that pathways towards ambitious climate goals within the growth paradigm, may in the end shift the problems to biodiversity, resource depletion of rare earth minerals and others, microplastics, man-made material exceeding living material, PFAS increase and the like. At the same time, it is questionable how much economic growth has managed to increase our well-being in developed economies in recent decades. With increasingly elaborate planned obsolescence, ever faster and more obscure fashion forcing consumption on us, and with marketing employing more psychologists to rewire our brains and make us addicted to health-damaging consumptions than we have to cure these ailments, it is a question if it is worth it. On the other hand, there are shocking inequalities in emissions, and it is a serious question if we can solve the climate crisis without reducing this inequality. Moving away from our addiction to growth could improve the quality of life for many in the overconsuming North, and can leave more carbon space for the global South to flourish. Degrowth scholarship also needs to consider that the proposed measures for redistribution do not reproduce the mistakes of our communist past as ample evidence shows that some egalitarian measures in the past resulted in even worse resource use and pollution, while others economized resource use. https://zagreb.degrowth.net/en/9_int_dg_conf/public/events/403 https://zagreb.degrowth.net/en/9_int_dg_conf/public/events/4... although much of this is clearly correct, it certainly sounds a lot more like 'the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability' than my more rational reconstruction above of what degrowth advocates ought to believe. worse, it includes the red flag that the speaker, despite being a professor of environmental sciences and a vice-chair of the ipcc, believes in 'resource depletion of rare earth minerals', which is not a thing unfortunately i dare not quote the person who comes to mind as a more rational degrowth advocate ürge-vorsatz's keynote does not seem to have been leaked to youtube, and liveleak is dead now, so we'd probably have to guess what she actually said, but recent interviews with her include https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNYrAOOrdA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNYrAOOrdA, in which she sticks to a mostly highly defensible but still very alarming overview of global warming. like kelsey's 'wildly controversial' position, though, she's advocating "to reach the same services or to supply even better services" despite lower energy consumption, rather than accepting a reduction in quality of living. so i am forced to admit that this is not a strawman kelsey made up, but the actual position of the first prominent, powerful degrowthist i looked up still, i don't think you can reduce the whole spectrum of degrowthism to kelsey's two extremes, and i think the more plausible position i outlined above also falls within it. https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/material-civilization/transnational-consumption-and-circulations/degrowth-history-idea https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/material-civilization... outlines a wider spectrum of positions my disagreement with that rational reconstruction of degrowth is severalfold. first, there are vastly more resources available than are merely on earth. second, especially with respect to energy, the accessible resources even on earth are mostly unexploited; terrestrial solar energy input is about three orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, or two orders of magnitude larger if we include food (the iea doesn't), and, depending over what time period you propose to extract it over, geothermal energy is another three orders of magnitude larger than that. third, economic value is not measured by the resources consumed, but by the utility provided to the consumer, so there is in principle no limit to economic growth even on a fixed resource base. fourth, the most urgent environmental problem for human quality of life is global warming, and atmospheric carbon capture is necessary to solve it, a measure which will almost certainly require vast expansion of human energy exploitation and therefore economic growth (because you can have growth without increased resource exploitation, but probably not vastly increased resource exploitation without growth)
carapace 2y ago
(I haven't read the article yet so apologies in advance if this is just noise, but uh...) A lot of people seem confused about "degrowth". (In quotes because it's a terrible neologism.) Look, people, degrowth is going to happen. It's not optional. We overshot basic physical realities and a "correction" is coming. The question is not whether we drastically change our economic and industrial systems, because that's going to happen no matter what, the question is how to soften the disasters so that billions of people don't die in the next century or so. Just to hammer this home: things will change, because Nature will change them for us. We can try to mitigate the worst of it, but we will have to scramble. The good news is that we know what to do and how to do it. We could fix things overnight (well, within a year or three) if we really put our minds to it, because we already have all the solutions (most of them were worked out in the 1970's!) The debate about degrowth is not whether or not to do it, the debate is whether to cushion the blow or just run off the cliff.
GemesAS 2y ago
I'm interested in environmental policy and dipped into reading the degrowth literature. IMO the review is correct, much of the academic degrowth literature is very weak--the field is more an activist movement rather than a scholarly one. It's funny to think of applying degrowth to past environmental problems. Let's imagine it's 1900 and we are concerned about the sustainability of whale hunting, would degrowing the world's economy be the right approach then? Maybe that is too extreme, what about ozone depletion 50 years ago? Would strangling economic development & technological innovation back then lead to a desirable future?

56 points by apsec112 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

There's an unspoken fallacy here. The case for degrowth is imperfect, but it's better than the case for infinite growth, which is effectively the current paradigm.

coreyh14444 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans
- supportengineer 2y ago
  I haven't read this book but I hope they came to the conclusion that this cannot be done without a huge expansion of the rail network.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
What about a third option, where we neither grow nor shrink? False dichotomies, anyone?
- randomdata 2y ago
  A system without at least some noise is effectively impossible. A system of this complexity is bound to have quite a lot of noise to contend with.
  - tempfile 2y ago
    Neither grow nor shrink on average - it's quite possible for a noisy system to be stable.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      By that token, as far as we know the system has always been stable, only that not enough datapoints to overcome the noise have been observed yet. What we are observing being anything other than noise is highly unlikely.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  It's a false dichotomy. But also, we need to gain efficiency, and quickly. That constitutes as growth. The degrowth ideas don't differentiate what kind of growth they are fighting, neither does targeting neutral growth. You can't target a single number that accurately, we need a details-based intervention.
dijit 2y ago
With the risk of wading into very controversial political territory. I think it's incredible that people have been told for 2 decades that the number of humans that exist is too many, that people should not have kids (it's so hard!, and expensive, treat yourself!), and so forth. But on the other hand, our society is designed in a way that: if it's not growing; it's disasterous. Which meant that our societies, thinking short-term as they do: turned to migration. Which can be quite unpopular and lead to civil unrest. IF having children is bad for the environment, why don't we just plan to shrink our economies? I know I sound naive but it's absurd to me that we don't make plans to have a shrinking population if obstensibly that's what we have to do as humanity to survive. Importing people is the worst kind of band-aid, it's totally unsustainable! And we still tell people not to have kids.
- danbruc 2y ago
  But on the other hand, our society is designed in a way that: if it's not growing; it's disasterous. Why? We could all just forever keep doing what we are doing today, nothing bad would happen. With a few caveats. We are depleting non-renewable resources and the population size is changing, that would eventually cause problems if not addressed. Also living standards are very unequal, in reality you could not convince the poorer people to not try to become richer.
randomdata 2y ago
Infinite growth is the best way to save the planet, enabling its fever to continue to rise unabated until the infection is killed off. Degrowth is apt to hinder the planet's defence mechanisms, prolonging the infection. But perhaps the planet isn't actually what we want to save, contrary to the headline?
danbruc 2y ago
Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever? As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really [...] You can almost certainly solve climate change with degrowth, the plantet can probably handle ten billion people living stone age lifestyles, it is just a question of how much we have to give up. But the not really part is the important one, you are not going to convince people to reduce their living standards significantly. If the required amount of degrowth means going back to the living standard from a couple of decades ago or more, that is not going to happen before the surface of the Earth is a deserted wasteland and people really feel the need. I guess the best you can do is maintaining the current living standard and put future growth into making that living standard less environmental impactful instead of further raising the living standard.
- agentultra 2y ago
  I’ve heard one claim that we could bring all 8.5 billion of us to the living standard of a middle class American in the 1960’s and still reduce the size of our economic footprint to fit within sustainable boundaries for a healthy planet. Not sure if that’s true. The claim is that wealth inequality and standards of living are not distributed evenly. A very small percentage of people on Earth emit much more carbon than the rest. Enough of a difference, perhaps, that the argument that we’d all be living in stone huts is a bit ridiculous if we were to focus on degrowth. What I find hard to digest about all of this is that the foundations of economics is based on a lot of shady hand-waving and pontificating. How we base our society and planning for our future on such a weak discipline is tiring.
  - danbruc 2y ago
    You are not going to convince people to go back to the 1960s. But I think that is also the wrong way of looking at it, just going back in time would be stupid. We have made advancements, for example houses and cars consuming less energy, it would make no sense to go back to the old technology. So you could probably have a larger house than you had in the 1960s while still having the same environmental footprint. Or did they already factor that in, you need 1950s energy consumption and with current technology that buys you 1960s stuff? One would really have to carefully analyze what you can fit into the available footprint with current technology. Maybe you only get two plane trips during your lifetime, that is one of the first things that comes to mind that people did a lot less in the past, travelling. But the would of course cause ripple effects and it could be really hard to predict the effects.
dukeyukey 2y ago
What do you mean by "infinite"? Can we keep growing by a few percentage points a year for the next few centuries? Yeah, probably. Can we do that until the heat death of the universe and beyond? Probably not. Stuff gets weird when you include "infinity".
- tzs 2y ago
  > Can we keep growing by a few percentage points a year for the next few centuries? Yeah, probably 2 percent a year for 200 years (the minimum rate and years that could count as a few) is a multiplier or around 52. For population that would give about 400 billion. > Can we do that until the heat death of the universe and beyond? Probably not. For population and energy we hit severe physical limits long before that. At 1% annual growth in population in 12000 years we run out room. What I mean by "run out of room" is that assuming no FTL travel then since every human right now is on Earth or in low Earth orbit no human 12000 years from now can be more than 12000 light years from Earth. The volume of a sphere 12000 light years in radius, divided by the population after 12000 years of 1% growth, is less than the volume of a human. How about energy? 9300 years of 1% annual energy growth starting now reaches a level where our annual consumption equals the energy of the entire Milky Way galaxy. By "energy of the entire Milky Way" mean everything...electromagnetic radiation, gravitational potential energy, the E=mc^2 energy of everything that has mass. If we can somehow actually do that, 2700 more years of 1% annual energy growth and we are annually consuming the entire energy of the observable universe. Its similar when you look at the mass to make human bodies. Here's what 1% annual population growth looks like in terms of mass needed: 3400 years to where the mass of human bodies equals the total mass of Earth and Moon. 600 more years and we also need Jupiter's mass. 700 more and we need the mass of the whole solar system. Then it is another 2000 before we need the mass of the entire Milky way. 100 more years and we need the Andromeda galaxy's mass too. That's 6800 years from now. Then it is 5500 years until all mass in the observable universe is needed for human bodies. Unless we get FTL travel it seems pretty clear than sometime in the next 12000 years either growth must slow or we have to change humans to require a lot less space, mass, and energy.
marcosdumay 2y ago
As far as "doesn't solve any of the problems, stops any of the solutions people are implanting right now from working, and makes sure nobody will try to solve the problem on the foreseeable future" qualifies as an "imperfect" solution. But yeah, "this thing is wrong, so we must do that other wrong thing instead" is a great talking point.

Circlecrypto2 2y ago

It's definitely not something any politician can back. There's no good way to spin that.

coreyh14444 2y ago

a) Nice to see this from Vox. More left-leaning readers need to hear this message. b) Look at a country like Norway. One of the wealthiest countries in the world (due to oil!) and they invest heavily in renewable energy and have the highest percentage of electric new car sales in the world.

ivann 2y ago
a) You only get this message if you stop at the title. The rest of the article is not a criticism of degrowth but a criticism of it's academic literature. b) At 12.6 tCO2eq/cap/year [0] I would not call this a success. [0] https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2023?vis=ghgpop#emissions_table https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2023?vis=ghgpop#emissi...
dopylitty 2y ago
Vox is not “left leaning”. It’s funded by right wing businesses like comcast[0] and constantly puts out right wing concern trolling like this piece and the other examples cited here.[1] 0: https://fair.org/home/comcast-owned-vox-explains-the-great-deal-youre-getting-from-comcast/ https://fair.org/home/comcast-owned-vox-explains-the-great-d... 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=citations+needed+vox+site%3A+medium.com https://www.google.com/search?q=citations+needed+vox+site%3A...

niek_pas 2y ago

The caption to this article states, “561 research papers in, the case for degrowth is still weak”, but the rest of the article seems to be not so much a criticism of degrowth, but rather a criticism of academic degrowth literature —- based on a single literature review.

boxed 2y ago
I would argue that academic degrowth literature is the best of degrowth thinking.
ch71r22 2y ago
Yeah, the article argues that degrowth doesn't have enough evidence and isn't progressing towards it fast enough. Valid, but that doesn't make me feel like the idea of degrowth is invalid. They say that degrowth ideas would do "approximately nothing," but then their own article they link to states that "a shift toward plant-rich diets would do more than any other single change" to reduce emissions. They bash on eating local, but the academic paper they cite concludes "eating locally grown fruits and vegetables may be an effective strategy to meaningfully reduce food system GHGEs from transportation."

cen4 2y ago

Just have to measure things differently. GDP grows even if someone profits while producing sewage, cause someone else profits from clean up. If you call both Growth naturally DeGrowth doesn't make sense. Take the Attention Economy which is HN is a micro example off. People's finite Attention is being pulled and pushed here and there, traded, captured or stolen. But the only thing that get measured is Growth in views or ycombinators net worth.

sneed_chucker 2y ago
Right. In the modern economy we have a bunch of pothole digging industries and a bunch of pothole filling industries, and the operation of both causes the GDP to go up.
- cassianoleal 2y ago
  Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit. The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit. They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit. Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing." "That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!" https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/qp49wz/two_economists_are_walking_in_a_forest_when_they/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/qp49wz/two_economist...
nradov 2y ago
Things are already measured differently, and always have been. Economists and policymakers have never really focused on maximizing GDP. They are fully aware that voters, lobbyists, and campaign contributors don't care about GDP as an abstract metric.
mlsu 2y ago
I prefer total energy use as a measure of human progress. At the end of the day, money is a proxy for energy consumption. By people in their labor, by machines, by the processing of information. Fortunately, it is steadily increasing.

mxfh 2y ago

PV is dirt cheap, battery materials are cheap and exist in abundance. All that's limited is the ROI for fossil industries, and they will fight tooth and nail to get the most out of their investments. Most importantly degrowth is a loosing position in the popularity contest, that is democracy. Selling carbon net neutral to negative ways of hedonism are the only way out.

chasd00 2y ago
Does "negative hedonism" mean suffering? that's a hard sell.
- NeutralCrane 2y ago
  They don’t mean “negative hedonism”, they mean “carbon-neutral or carbon-negative hedonism”. In other words, people are going to chose hedonism, comfort, fun, and consumption no matter what, so the only way to achieve these goals is to make hedonism carbon-neutral/negative.
- vinyl7 2y ago
  I would take it as a return to community/family focus instead of selfish individualism
- realce 2y ago
  IMO a great example is that it means not building floating skyscrapers powered by diesel fuel so that people can shop at a mall in the middle of the ocean.
- rybosome 2y ago
  I take it to mean less pleasure, which I suppose is a form of suffering. I don’t follow the logic of the comment you’re replying to that degrowth would be a hard sell to a democracy, but reducing comfort and pleasure wouldn’t.
- mxfh 2y ago
  Hehe, yeah clarified that. Meant more things like lifting speed limits on Autobahns and other highways for EVs during excess energy renewable energy windows. Or effectively from May until October in Europe.

samvher 2y ago

What a terrible title for the content of the article. Only the first few paragraphs provide some support of it, but not directly but rather through linking out. Of course setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal isn't going to do much good. But "shrinking parts of the economy" might be necessary for a safe and healthy future. And whether the parts that don't need to be shrunk will still provide enough growth to end up with overall economic growth is hard to say (i.e. a safe and healthy future might require some sacrifices compared to the status quo). Oversimplifying, growth can come from increasing the resources you use or the efficiency with which you use them. The former might not be something that we can keep doing at the current rate (and we might need to reduce some resource usage). The latter is pretty much a pure win. Similarly, aggregate growth can come from hypergrowth in a small part of an otherwise stagnant population. And aggregate degrowth can come from modest growth in part of the population and shrinkage in another part. So just setting "aggregate growth" as your target is just as naive as setting "shrinking the economy" as a goal as it might not have the results we collectively want.

ASalazarMX 2y ago
Modern economy has become too complex and stupid at the same time. There are layers upon layers that contribute nothing to it, yet somehow inflate the valuation, and burst from time to time, while a few take full advantage of it. I think it should be possible to radically simplify taxation and law, with the goal of maximizing productivity and minimizing parasitism. The economy would shrink in numbers, but quality of life should generally improve. Bonus points if population growth is not encouraged, but is allowed to find a lower equilibrium. The global economy shouldn't work like a Ponzi scheme.

hedora 2y ago

Usually, growth comes from increased efficiency, and increased efficiency usually results in lower environmental impact. I don’t get how the degrowth movement can seriously argue that blocking that sort of progress would help the planet. Instead, we should price in environmental externalities whenever possible. E.g., want to manufacture plastic? Great. Recycle at least as much post consumer waste into feedstock equivalent to what you shipped, and also use atmospheric carbon capture to bring your net co2 emissions to zero, pay to clean up the air pollution, etc. Of course, doing that would create GDP growth, and also require a growth in our energy supply.

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monkaiju 2y ago
> Usually, growth comes from increased efficiency, and increased efficiency usually results in lower environmental impact. This is in fact very commonly not the case, to the point that its a standalone concept in Economics called Jevons Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
rob74 2y ago
Well, the same "political poison" argument that the article advances against "degrowth" can also be applied to your proposal (or any other proposal that benefits the environment): if they are followed, plastic gets more expensive, and all opposition parties will blame you for making people poorer because they now have to pay more for every single product packaged in plastic (conveniently ignoring of course that there are other ways to package products). The sad truth is that the environment doesn't vote in elections, people do, and people are generally selfish...
nicoburns 2y ago
I don't think many people are arguing against increased efficiency. They're arguing against growth-without-caveats-or-nuance as a goal. Which might seem like something one shouldn't have to argue against, but it has been a key part of the mainstream political ideology for the last few decades.

itishappy 2y ago

> Is degrowth just the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or is it the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability? That's a great question. In my mind the great question. I have not encountered much degrowth sentiment online, it seems largely to be anti-growth-at-all-costs sentiment (the former of the two questions). The article appears to assume and argue against the latter.

sumuyuda 2y ago
I think the degrowth discussion is not anti-growth at all costs, but reducing damaging and wasteful production and instead focusing on production that provides social good for humans. See this podcast: https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshape_technology_w_jason_hickel https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshap...
- cholantesh 2y ago
  There's also an episode on effective altruism, which the author is a proponent of, which is pretty important in casting light on this frame of analysis.
  - sumuyuda 2y ago
    Do you have a link to the episode?
    - cholantesh 2y ago
      To clarify it's actually been talked about a few times, but with specific focus on substrands/topics in EA. Here are two that I'm aware of: https://techwontsave.us/episode/198_how_effective_accelerationism_divides_silicon_valley_w_emile_torres https://techwontsave.us/episode/198_how_effective_accelerati... https://techwontsave.us/episode/138_dont_fall_for_the_longtermism_sales_pitch_w_emile_p_torres https://techwontsave.us/episode/138_dont_fall_for_the_longte...

uludag 2y ago

> Shrinking the economy won’t save the planet Interesting choice of headline for the article. Maybe a better one would be "Metatudy notes degrowth studies' methodologies lacking."

mihaic 2y ago

This is a type of discussion where I'm always infuriated that I have to use the wrong terms to describe both the problem and potential solutions. Being forced to choose in terms of "growth" or "degrowth" reduces everything to GDP-centric thinking. Simply making people poor to cut down on 5% of emissions is just like banning plastic straws but allowing plastic cups. Realizing as well that constant economic growth is impossible in the long term is required so we start figuring out a more sustainable system. I'm pretty sure quality of life can be improved even if the GDP shrinks, but it needs to be put as a primary target. At the same time, as an EU citized, the fact that shipping a product from the Netherlands is twice as expensive as a product with free shipping from Temu means that we've got low hanging fruits that can be instantly tackled, but nobody is interested in cost/benefit analysis but only in optics of elections.

caust1c 2y ago

I've done a lot of thinking and reading on this subject, as I'm sure many other HN readers have. I've come to the same conclusion as the Vox article. I haven't found any compelling argument for how or why degrowth specifically would work. Sure, I think it's toxic that individuals and corporations pursue growth at all costs, but currency is fundamentally a tool created to resolve debts and for that to work effectively must come with some incentives for allocation and payback. Capitalism has brought the entire world out of poverty and enabled massive innovation at a global scale before most modern technology as we know it. It's the most efficient way to allocate needed resources as far as I can tell. What I do think is urgently needed are 2 things: 1. Some way to incentivize local spending over global spending, and it's probably not tariffs due to easy loopholes and negative externalities. People have started to do this of their own accord because we can sense it is right and more just. 2. Find better, more general ways to encourage competition and prevent anticompetitive behavior in markets. Everyone here knows how much more efficient small groups of people can be relative to large organizations. How can we make anticompetitive behavior and market dominance harder in the general sense? There aren't easy answers to these two problems, but it sure as hell isn't total deregulation with laissez-faire capitalism and it sure as hell isn't centralized planned economies and communism. It's obviously somewhere in between.

kragen 2y ago

when i read this, i didn't think kelsey's description of what degrowth is was accurate as i understand it, the degrowth position is not, as she says, either 'the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or (...) the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability'. rather, the degrowth position is that people are inevitably going to lead worse lives than at present, but that we can choose between things getting kind of bad, by systematically pursuing degrowth, and things getting apocalyptically bad, which is what will happen if we continue pursuing growth i think this position is wrong, but that's my understanding of what degrowth advocates are promoting specifically they argue that continued economic growth, or even continued economic activity at current levels, will unavoidably destroy the natural environment, and that that destruction will diminish the human standard of living in ways that no economic prosperity can replace; you can't compensate for widespread desertification and pervasive environmental endocrine disruptors with products you can buy. going for a walk in the park without needing a respirator cannot be replaced with visits to disneyland; the opportunity to have children of your own cannot be replaced with tasty vat meat however, i have to admit that wikipedia's summary of degrowth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth is closer to theunitofcaring's in this article. and check out this abstract of the opening keynote at last year's degrowth conference in zagreb, by diana ürge-vorsatz, who is apparently the vice-chair of ipcc working group iii (mitigation): > It was in 2022 when the IPCC first mentioned Degrowth and sufficiency in its reports. It is a significant move considering that most IPCC member states still struggle from meeting basic human needs. However, there are many sections in IPCC products that indicate that growth imperatives make meeting ambitious climate goals extremely challenging or risky. An important risk is that pathways towards ambitious climate goals within the growth paradigm, may in the end shift the problems to biodiversity, resource depletion of rare earth minerals and others, microplastics, man-made material exceeding living material, PFAS increase and the like. At the same time, it is questionable how much economic growth has managed to increase our well-being in developed economies in recent decades. With increasingly elaborate planned obsolescence, ever faster and more obscure fashion forcing consumption on us, and with marketing employing more psychologists to rewire our brains and make us addicted to health-damaging consumptions than we have to cure these ailments, it is a question if it is worth it. On the other hand, there are shocking inequalities in emissions, and it is a serious question if we can solve the climate crisis without reducing this inequality. Moving away from our addiction to growth could improve the quality of life for many in the overconsuming North, and can leave more carbon space for the global South to flourish. Degrowth scholarship also needs to consider that the proposed measures for redistribution do not reproduce the mistakes of our communist past as ample evidence shows that some egalitarian measures in the past resulted in even worse resource use and pollution, while others economized resource use. https://zagreb.degrowth.net/en/9_int_dg_conf/public/events/403 https://zagreb.degrowth.net/en/9_int_dg_conf/public/events/4... although much of this is clearly correct, it certainly sounds a lot more like 'the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability' than my more rational reconstruction above of what degrowth advocates ought to believe. worse, it includes the red flag that the speaker, despite being a professor of environmental sciences and a vice-chair of the ipcc, believes in 'resource depletion of rare earth minerals', which is not a thing unfortunately i dare not quote the person who comes to mind as a more rational degrowth advocate ürge-vorsatz's keynote does not seem to have been leaked to youtube, and liveleak is dead now, so we'd probably have to guess what she actually said, but recent interviews with her include https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNYrAOOrdA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNYrAOOrdA, in which she sticks to a mostly highly defensible but still very alarming overview of global warming. like kelsey's 'wildly controversial' position, though, she's advocating "to reach the same services or to supply even better services" despite lower energy consumption, rather than accepting a reduction in quality of living. so i am forced to admit that this is not a strawman kelsey made up, but the actual position of the first prominent, powerful degrowthist i looked up still, i don't think you can reduce the whole spectrum of degrowthism to kelsey's two extremes, and i think the more plausible position i outlined above also falls within it. https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/material-civilization/transnational-consumption-and-circulations/degrowth-history-idea https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/material-civilization... outlines a wider spectrum of positions my disagreement with that rational reconstruction of degrowth is severalfold. first, there are vastly more resources available than are merely on earth. second, especially with respect to energy, the accessible resources even on earth are mostly unexploited; terrestrial solar energy input is about three orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, or two orders of magnitude larger if we include food (the iea doesn't), and, depending over what time period you propose to extract it over, geothermal energy is another three orders of magnitude larger than that. third, economic value is not measured by the resources consumed, but by the utility provided to the consumer, so there is in principle no limit to economic growth even on a fixed resource base. fourth, the most urgent environmental problem for human quality of life is global warming, and atmospheric carbon capture is necessary to solve it, a measure which will almost certainly require vast expansion of human energy exploitation and therefore economic growth (because you can have growth without increased resource exploitation, but probably not vastly increased resource exploitation without growth)

carapace 2y ago

(I haven't read the article yet so apologies in advance if this is just noise, but uh...) A lot of people seem confused about "degrowth". (In quotes because it's a terrible neologism.) Look, people, degrowth is going to happen. It's not optional. We overshot basic physical realities and a "correction" is coming. The question is not whether we drastically change our economic and industrial systems, because that's going to happen no matter what, the question is how to soften the disasters so that billions of people don't die in the next century or so. Just to hammer this home: things will change, because Nature will change them for us. We can try to mitigate the worst of it, but we will have to scramble. The good news is that we know what to do and how to do it. We could fix things overnight (well, within a year or three) if we really put our minds to it, because we already have all the solutions (most of them were worked out in the 1970's!) The debate about degrowth is not whether or not to do it, the debate is whether to cushion the blow or just run off the cliff.

GemesAS 2y ago

I'm interested in environmental policy and dipped into reading the degrowth literature. IMO the review is correct, much of the academic degrowth literature is very weak--the field is more an activist movement rather than a scholarly one. It's funny to think of applying degrowth to past environmental problems. Let's imagine it's 1900 and we are concerned about the sustainability of whale hunting, would degrowing the world's economy be the right approach then? Maybe that is too extreme, what about ozone depletion 50 years ago? Would strangling economic development & technological innovation back then lead to a desirable future?