Legend2440
8 hours ago
Degrowth is such a stupid idea. All the things that make your life better - housing, healthcare, education, food, iphones, air conditioning, cars, and more - are forms of wealth.
You cannot have more of them without economic growth, because these things are economic growth.
netsharc
8 hours ago
And forest fires burning down whole towns, pandemics, drought, crop failures, social unrest due to hungry people trying to move to more livable areas are externalities that economic growth can also solve, right?
HEmanZ
8 hours ago
The extreme degrowth almost seem like a climate-disinformation psyops because it's so stupid. Like I'm more convinced they're propaganda to discredit climate action than actually trying to fight for it.
I have to remind myself that more likely, people have just no idea what "economic growth" means and develop some strawman definition based on basically no background understanding.
warkdarrior
8 hours ago
Degrowth is for other people, not me.
newspaper1
8 hours ago
But economic growth fails to model externalities. All that stuff is good, unless we cook the earth using it and kill everyone. iPhones are great for us but what about the kids dying the lithium mine? …
Probably not popular ideas on this forum, but they also can’t just be dismissed (but they will get downvoted lol).
sobellian
8 hours ago
A single carbon tax would be a market-oriented solution that captures the externality of CO2 emission - and would likely still permit economic growth! You don't need to revolutionize the entire basis on which human civilization has acted for millennia in order to solve the problem. And if you did have to, one could reasonably expect that effort to fail.
newspaper1
8 hours ago
That’s one single variable out of near infinite externalities. Other examples: collapsing the food chain by wiping out critical pieces through urbanization, microplastics poisoning all animal life (potentially), global warming due to heat capture of asphalt… Some of these may have solutions, some might not be problems but what’s definitely true is that “growth = good” is way too simplistic a model.
sobellian
7 hours ago
I think there's a middle ground between laissez-faire capitalism and degrowth. As far as I can tell no one in this thread has been arguing that laissez-faire always produces great outcomes, simply (and rightly) that degrowth is a horrible idea.
newspaper1
7 hours ago
I’m talking about our existing economy, not laissez-faire. These externalities are not modeled in it.
> simply (and rightly) that degrowth is a horrible idea.
I don’t agree that it’s this clear. If growth is happening mainly for the rich (which it currently is), then I fully support de-growing them.
sobellian
7 hours ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1qcy40d/growth_in_u...
It's nice to be wealthy, but growth is happening for everyone. But as an overarching point, you appear to be arguing against a strawman. No one as far as I can tell in this thread is arguing for the status quo, especially regarding climate policy. They're just arguing against the notion that humanity's lot can be improved by nuking the economy in order to save the climate.
I understand that it is a lot more boring to discuss measured market interventions than eating the rich (incidentally, how will eating the rich solve the environmental problems of urbanization?). But it will be a lot more productive assuming one's starting goal is truly the environment rather than eating the rich.
newspaper1
7 hours ago
I mean those charts don’t pass the sniff test. Being healthy (or sick for that matter!) was basically free, now it costs over a thousand dollars a month in insurance. A huge chunk of most people’s income.
Same with housing (and education): https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-...
sobellian
6 hours ago
Is it fair to say that you're more interested in discussing wealth inequality than environmental policy?
newspaper1
6 hours ago
Degrowth touches both subjects. Billionaires for instance are top polluters. Leveling resource distribution would prevent that.
marssaxman
8 hours ago
Degrowth is simply a refusal to engage in magical thinking. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet: growth must therefore have an end. Would we prefer to choose a gentle mode of deceleration which keeps us comfortable along the way, or would we prefer to wait and do all the decelerating at once, when we hit the wall?
throw0101a
7 hours ago
> You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet: growth must therefore have an end.
Per capita (real) income has over doubled in California since 1975, and yet the per capita energy use has stayed the same (see "Art Rosenfeld"):
* https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/01/27/art-rosenfeld-californ...
Economic growth does not (just) entail making more stuff, especially in the US, when so much is "services".
Legend2440
8 hours ago
We are nowhere close to thermodynamic limits. Another 100x or even 100000x growth is entirely possible.
We aren't even using 0.01% of the solar energy that hits the Earth's surface, let alone what we could capture with possible future technologies.
There are challenges to growth, like climate change, but we can engineer solutions instead of throwing our hands up and going home.
marssaxman
8 hours ago
It sounds like you agree with the premise, then, that there are planetary limits, and that growth must ultimately end: you are simply looking at different limits, and you see a lot of runway left. People who are looking at ecological limits tend to have a less optimistic view.
HEmanZ
8 hours ago
No one says literally infinite growth. That's a stupid strawman and if you are arguing at that level you are not engaging, you are just playing tribal in-group signaling. And we don't need to think about growth 10,000 years from now, we have no idea, not the slightest clue, what the technological, cultural, and human landscape looks like in the timeline long enough to actually start having to think about the edge of growth
There is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, to think we are nearing the end of genuinely useful growth. We still die early of cancer, spend too much time working, live in too small domiciles, don't enjoy enough hobbies, eat worse food than we'd like, etc. We are nearing catastrophe because of our carbon-producing energy sources, but that's not "growth" generally, that's a specific problem.
marssaxman
7 hours ago
> No one says literally infinite growth.
The previous poster said "degrowth is such a stupid idea", which amounts to the same thing.
> We are nearing catastrophe because of our carbon-producing energy sources, but that's not "growth" generally, that's a specific problem.
That is only one of many ecological limits we are approaching, or which we have already exceeded.