4 ms·

Your comment made me think: interestingly, "growth" as a key concept is being forced on all of us right now, no matter one appreciates it or not... (either dire

Your comment made me think: interestingly, "growth" as a key concept is being forced on all of us right now, no matter one appreciates it or not... (either directly or indirectly). If I forget about the word itself (and being unsure of the cultural connotation associated with it outside France - which I have no idea of), I personally do relate to the following sentence in the wikipedia definition: === maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, culture and community ====

jacques_chester 14y ago
> is being forced on all of us right now By whom? I don't see men out the front with guns and dogs, demanding that I pop up to the electronics store to get the latest TV. Or that the Buy Stuff Or Else Act 2012 had just passed through both houses of Parliament and received Royal Assent.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- aes256 14y ago
  The pursuit of economic growth shapes government policy, and although government may not always station their guns and dogs outside your residence, their decisions impact pretty much everything you do in some way.
- coroxout 14y ago
  Well, a bank account is almost required for life in most Western countries now (unless you can receive all your income/benefits and pay all your bills in cash - not even an option for my salary or utility bills), and banks are only willing to give every Joe Public a current account on the assumption that they'll be able to make a profit on most of the money on the stock market before Joe wants it back, and the assumption that you can almost always make that profit is based on growth being an almost inevitable fixture of the universe... ...so yes, I think growth has forced its way into our day-to-day lives even if you are successfully ignoring any suggestions to buy the latest consumer gadgetry.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    That is a seriously strange complaint. The reason a bank can provide a service to your for free is that it expects growth in society, therefore growth is forced upon you?
    - coroxout 14y ago
      I read '"growth" as a key concept is being forced on all of us right now' to mean it's hard to opt out of a lifestyle which is dependent on economic growth as a given, which I agree with, and gave the above as an example. I may have misunderstood the slightly ambiguous quoted text; do you believe this to be the case, or do you still find my reasoning "seriously strange"?
      - mseebach 14y ago
        Yes. Where are you being coerced to take any action you wouldn't have otherwise taken because of the way your bank makes money? Why would your life be less growthy if you happened to pay your bank a few dollars a month instead?
- thibaut_barrere 14y ago
  By the society we're part of, as a whole. This includes politics, industries, businesses, and ourselves. Individual decisions only go so far - you can decide to "degrowth", but if the politics, or culture, or industries are oriented toward growth, this is pretty much a drop in the water (well until a given subject becomes suddenly important, like we saw with environmental issues in France a couple of years back). If as a society we consider stability and sustainability to be more important than growth, then this affects a lot of our decisions: expectations of how long a given useful product should work (appliances etc), how we decide about things that are worth investing time and resources in, subjects to be taught at school, kind of jobs to be created etc. Now a true "cultural" question: you mentioned that people should not "expect the rest of us to appreciate being forced to do it" - is that because in your country, there is an activism (perceived as negative?) around degrowth? Honest question: I'd like to understand your initial reaction!
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    You're sort of grasping that no one agent is actually in charge of the whole shebang -- that it's an emergent phenomenon. Any genuine attempt at degrowth will require some pretty unpopular policies. Folk like that their lives, on the whole, improve over time (modulo real estate in first world countries ... but that's another rant for another time). So it's possible to degrowth at an individual level; but at a societal level, it would require force and cause more disruption than people realise. And I'm agin' it.
- mindslight 14y ago
  So I'm 9 days late to this thread (don't know how I missed it, I must have been doing something), but I can't let this infectious antitruth stand. There are indeed men with guns, dogs, and even armored vehicles forcing you to carry out most of your transactions in USD, thereby giving value to USD no matter how poorly it is being managed. Maximizing production through government spending and new money creation overdriving the economy is the thesis of Keynesian economics. What exactly does a 0.2% interest rate say about how we view preparing for tomorrow?

jacques_chester 14y ago

> is being forced on all of us right now By whom? I don't see men out the front with guns and dogs, demanding that I pop up to the electronics store to get the latest TV. Or that the Buy Stuff Or Else Act 2012 had just passed through both houses of Parliament and received Royal Assent.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
aes256 14y ago
The pursuit of economic growth shapes government policy, and although government may not always station their guns and dogs outside your residence, their decisions impact pretty much everything you do in some way.
coroxout 14y ago
Well, a bank account is almost required for life in most Western countries now (unless you can receive all your income/benefits and pay all your bills in cash - not even an option for my salary or utility bills), and banks are only willing to give every Joe Public a current account on the assumption that they'll be able to make a profit on most of the money on the stock market before Joe wants it back, and the assumption that you can almost always make that profit is based on growth being an almost inevitable fixture of the universe... ...so yes, I think growth has forced its way into our day-to-day lives even if you are successfully ignoring any suggestions to buy the latest consumer gadgetry.
- mseebach 14y ago
  That is a seriously strange complaint. The reason a bank can provide a service to your for free is that it expects growth in society, therefore growth is forced upon you?
  - coroxout 14y ago
    I read '"growth" as a key concept is being forced on all of us right now' to mean it's hard to opt out of a lifestyle which is dependent on economic growth as a given, which I agree with, and gave the above as an example. I may have misunderstood the slightly ambiguous quoted text; do you believe this to be the case, or do you still find my reasoning "seriously strange"?
    - mseebach 14y ago
      Yes. Where are you being coerced to take any action you wouldn't have otherwise taken because of the way your bank makes money? Why would your life be less growthy if you happened to pay your bank a few dollars a month instead?
thibaut_barrere 14y ago
By the society we're part of, as a whole. This includes politics, industries, businesses, and ourselves. Individual decisions only go so far - you can decide to "degrowth", but if the politics, or culture, or industries are oriented toward growth, this is pretty much a drop in the water (well until a given subject becomes suddenly important, like we saw with environmental issues in France a couple of years back). If as a society we consider stability and sustainability to be more important than growth, then this affects a lot of our decisions: expectations of how long a given useful product should work (appliances etc), how we decide about things that are worth investing time and resources in, subjects to be taught at school, kind of jobs to be created etc. Now a true "cultural" question: you mentioned that people should not "expect the rest of us to appreciate being forced to do it" - is that because in your country, there is an activism (perceived as negative?) around degrowth? Honest question: I'd like to understand your initial reaction!
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  You're sort of grasping that no one agent is actually in charge of the whole shebang -- that it's an emergent phenomenon. Any genuine attempt at degrowth will require some pretty unpopular policies. Folk like that their lives, on the whole, improve over time (modulo real estate in first world countries ... but that's another rant for another time). So it's possible to degrowth at an individual level; but at a societal level, it would require force and cause more disruption than people realise. And I'm agin' it.
mindslight 14y ago
So I'm 9 days late to this thread (don't know how I missed it, I must have been doing something), but I can't let this infectious antitruth stand. There are indeed men with guns, dogs, and even armored vehicles forcing you to carry out most of your transactions in USD, thereby giving value to USD no matter how poorly it is being managed. Maximizing production through government spending and new money creation overdriving the economy is the thesis of Keynesian economics. What exactly does a 0.2% interest rate say about how we view preparing for tomorrow?