Japan is a living case study of degrowth: GDP has been essentially flat for the past 20 years. The scale below exaggerates small shifts, but it was $4968B in 2000 and $4937B in 2020.
On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.
Thing is, GDP is a lousy measure of growth. Japan is undergoing a contraction and fossilization of its social structure.
Interestingly enough, the same is happening slowly in USA and UK, and then after a big space everywhere else. Note the anti-immigration and austerity rhetoric, where what is needed is a major social change, considering of some attempts to level the playing field and prevent the current corporate and political aristocracies from emerging again.
Aa for rural drain, it's been happening everywhere, mostly because for some reason we do not pay farmers enough, nor the systems we made allow even groups of then to be self sufficient.
The move to rural could be countered by spreading, modernizing and connecting smaller hubs. Companies don't want to spread, so people don't want to spread, so companies don't want to spread, repeat ad infinitum.
US and UK hugely benefit from massive immigration. They are going to grow their population, contrary to what is going to happen in most of the western world.
From 2016 to 2060, the US is expected to grow by ~80M people [0], even though a big chunk of that growth (45%) will be for people who are 65 or older.
There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia. No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
>There is an obvious way out. Increase immigration. The US does this well. Why doesn't Japan? Because of racism and xenophobia.
Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation.
Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is).
>No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either.
"Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else. Telling the Japanese what they should do is arrogant paternalism.
Immigration is just colonial appropriation. It's the solution proposed by city dwellers who think we should live 50 deep in a square mile of massive cities - generally an upper middle class who seem to believe they should have constant access to cheap servants they don't have to personally house and look after.
Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work.
We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.
We are headed for a massive population collapse everywhere
Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement.
Japan, China, Europe, Russia.
The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?)
We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain.
Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population.
Call it whatever you want but by and large people prefer to live around other people with whom they share the same culture and language. Even in countries with large amounts of immigration people self-segregate to be around people like themselves.
I see this stated often, but it doesn't seem right to me. Almost any professional with a job offer from a Japanese company can get a work visa. Incoming software developers (and other in-demand workers) can probably rack up enough points to qualify as an HSFP/高度人材 and get permanent residence after 5 years. With enough points you can get it in one.
Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.
This would seem to be only a temporary local solution. Once world population stabilizes or starts shrinking, you can only increase population by exporting the problem to somebody else.
Immigration to Japan pre-covid was about as strict as going to the US from EU. All countries restrict severely to skilled workers only. US has the bonus of not requiring a barely spoken language globally to integrate.
The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.
Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
I mean Japan has a much lower crime rate than the US, and no massive opioid epidemic, huge homeless camps in the middle of major cities or elderly Asian people being randomly assaulted on the streets like the US does, so I don't know why it should follow in the footsteps of the US. The US should set an example that others want to follow.
i think america is uniquely well suited to accept immigrants bc that's how we got made. one of the biggest things i learned talking to friends i made from outside our country is we don't even realize how much more diverse and accepting we are. like we've obviously got room to grow but looking at how europe is doing after letting in some immigrants is kinda startling.
Japan’s GDP per capita is similar to what it was in the mid-90s despite sizable per-worker productivity gains because their population is aging rapidly.
However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.
And they will remain unpalatable as long as pensioners currently benefiting from the status quo (generous pensions paid in full, cheap healthcare etc) retain an absolute voting majority, which they will continue to do for several decades.
Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.
Is that a necessary result, or just a matter of how the economy was organized and money distributed? In other words, does politics and culture come into play in the result?
These are moderately interesting questions, but without some actual insight (preferably informed) it just sounds like you're being contrarian for no reason.
I'll probably be downvoted because this is stupid but I was wondering the other day whether Japan will be the first country to start factory breeding of humans, Brave New World style. If there was ever a candidate for it, Japan is certainly it.
Sorry, that number was pulled out of my ass, but the collapse is happening:
> In 1985, there were 7 working-age people for each dependent elderly person. By 2010, that number had dropped all the way to 2.8. Moreover, it is projected to fall even further: to 1.7 in 2035 and 1.3 in 2060.
> an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty
Sounds like the rest of the Western world. We're not living in such a capitalist utopia over here either, are we?
I think most of us on this forum are sheltered from how the rest of the developed world lives, with our 250k a year and private health insurance. Because from what I see here in Europe it's a temp worker world and single mothers living in almost poverty, with a welfare state close to bankruptcy.
We don't have the jobs for life, in that you might be fired out of the blue, so I don't know which is worse in this case.
The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious. Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn.
What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security. They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
edit: I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry.
People seem to be willing to trade some level of security for some level of luxury. This is why people take out the largest mortgage they possibly can given their income, and spend money they don't have on cars (which they will take a long time to pay off).
These revealed preferences are hard to deny, and it would be quite presumptuous to impose a different trade-off on a plurality/majority of the populace.
However, I believe that their lack of security is due to their lack of power, and that their lack of power is due to their lack of wealth, their loans and that they do not own the companies in which they work.
Consequently I see wealth and power as effectively the same and become moderately unhappy when I see policies that will in any way reduce the wealth or power of ordinary people.
So, while I used the word 'conditions' I actually meant their state of subjugation.
> The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious.
That's not for you to decide. The market can and does apply proper growth slowing pressure by itself.
> Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn.
That's just a different version of "think of the poor who can't eat". Countries and cultures aren't the same. Suburbia only exists due to improper distribution of business centers and housing bubbles. Overpopulated mega-cities don't have to exist with proper distribution of work and living space. Majority of countries are uninhabited and undeveloped.
> What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security.
Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.
> They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things.
Firing is necessary to keep efficiency and competition.
> Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
Who will "supply security"? People who work and who are getting paid so they buy stuff. Who pays and produce their stuff? Other people who need to work. The demand for "security" will only keep increasing due to comfort. There's a reason Bill Clinton was elected on a platform to reform the welfare system.
> We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
And why is it that economic growth seems to be the only ladder recognised in the economic mainstream for poverty alleviation?
The latter question is one that's addressed often in the writing and talks of Herman Daly, one example I've recently come across being a 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the CASSE podcast, which discusses Daly's work and academic heritage:
A more useful framing of the question might be to assume that degrowth is a given, whether you believe this or not, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns.
The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth and absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms which notes that the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now), without reallocation.
But wealth and livelihood allocation are social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, several times.
Imagine there is a leech stuck on your body sucking blood. You will now have to eat more to replenish the blood. Here is the kicker though, the leech gets bigger as it sucks out more blood out of your body and therefore it will start draining more blood from your body.
You go to your doctor and he says take these pills they will make your body grow bigger. As the leech gets bigger you must get bigger which means you must take more pills. If you stop taking the pills, the leech will outpace your body growth and your body will suffer from anemia despite having more blood in your body than the average healthy human.
Suddenly everyone gets a fetish for being as large as an possible, it is good for your health, nobody ever questions whether they should just get rid of the leech and get their body to a normal height.
It’s certainly the best ladder I’m aware of that we’ve discovered- you climb it, by and large, by providing value to other people. A little value to a lot of people, usually. And because you are producing new value, you don’t provoke a conflict by reallocating the value away from the previous people.
Most older ladders were providing a lot of value to a few existing rulers, and concentrated the utility-allocating aspects of society in the hands of a few. And much of the value being provided was through violent seizure.
Isn't it odd that without the poor get poorer even though common sense tells you that a lack of growth shouldn't make you poorer?
Or think about it this way, when there is no growth left, you must actually get people to cooperate with each other and as far as I know we never learned how to do that.
"r > g" societies are ones where the wealth is concentrating. This can be masked if g is positive and everyone else is also getting better off in absolute terms.
"r > (g=0)" is therefore one where the rich are getting richer in a zero sum way; because there isn't any growth, you can only make a fortune by taking it off other people.
"0 >= g > r" on the other hand looks extremely different from today: the return on capital is zero or negative. How can you invest in that environment? Negative interest rates? Negative retirement savings?
(My somewhat bleak conclusion is therefore "r > g > 0 will remain, but with increasing catastrophes that wipe out chunks of both r and g")
This seems to conflate the ideas of growth and value. Labor creates some growth but is mostly value. Value is the reallocation of existing wealth. Growth is the creation of new wealth. Both happen when we do (productive) work. Capital needs to get comfortable with the idea that they must "spend money to make money".
Well of course it is getting more skewed. A lot of industries have not actually become more productive. Industries where making the first copy is very difficult, and subsequent copies are basically free, be it software, books, movies, TV. Economies of scale, opening to new markets means those returns are higher than ever.
Compare that to a janitor pushing a broom. How has he become more efficient in the last 50 years. And a lot of industries seem to have had negative productivity growth, the ratio of administrators to professors in college is going in the wrong direction
The rich don’t take much. The vast majority of their wealth is paper. A billionaire who jet sets around and has five homes and a staff might at most consume the resources of a few hundred middle class Americans.
You might approach the footprint of a medium sized town if you built your own orbital lair and lived like a cyberpunk oligarch in space. Maybe.
Of course for some resources there is little difference at all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t eat much more than you do.
Money is not physical. Start redistributing physical stuff and you’ll find that soaking the rich barely makes a dent.
Usually the degrowth people also advocate for massive redistribution so that everyone would be equally poor. I doubt that's politically possible in most of the world so the alternative would be feudal degrowth which, as you said, is evil.
Among my thoughts as I read this, one which has recurred from time to time: it might be interesting to attempt some kind of reading club on HN in which an article or book is selected for future discussion.
This piece runs about 10 pages printed, or roughly 5,000 words, which seems to challenge HN. And that's before considering that it's further discussing not one but four books, totalling over 1,000 pages.
I'd be quite interested in hearing from those who've read one or all of these, and if there were some way to invoke MacBeth's weird sisters, and agree when we three (or however many) should meet again to discuss them ... would be of interest.
There actually was a proposal for an HN book club ... 14 years ago:
Take it up with Dang. Could be a monthly post like the hiring posts. Probably rig up a poll for voting on next month’s book. You could make your own posts, but they would never get traction without some HN leadership blessings.
HN used to have book recommendation posts pretty often, but maybe we’ve gotten less literary over time. I’ve read about a dozen books that were recommended here and they were all awesome.
So why now? Would it have been better to stop growing in Roman or medial times, for example? Or stop only in a 100 years?
Degrowth seems to me like a vision of the future that assumes that humans should remain slaves of their environment and not become masters of it. If humans are to become the dominant species in the universe, degrowth will not help.
From my reading of degrowth works the answer is: because now the global resource use induced by growth have accumulated enourmous negative externality costs, costs that will nedlessly increase further unless counteracted by degrowth policy. Food shortages, deadly heatwaves, property destruction. Direct dire costs to human health and welfare and rippling secondary effects. For example how would a scenario with hundreds of millions of climate refugees play out on top of current global political tensions?
I see the degrowth view not as "we should never ever have growth again" but rather the current modes of growth have very tangible imminent (on an astronomical timescale) negative effects that we must deal with right now.
If we fail to step up to the current challenge of provisioning health and welfare for beings on this planet how likely are we to manage an all universe encompassing expansion without it ending in catastrophe on the largest scale? You could see the climate change challenge, and the degrowth plan to tackle it, as a necessary step to get our house in order, before expanding out.
Us attempting to expand into and shaping the universe is quite a task - so much could go right or wrong. I think Toby Ord's The Precipice[0] has a very useful framework for thinking about such risks.
Fair enough on the intermediate step possibility. However, it is often sold more like a return to simpler lifestyles for forever - or maybe the proponents I encountered just happen to lean that way.
As far as dire scenarios are concerned, I struggle with them as usually the realities play out differently. Arguably in part because people do consider such scenarios.
Direct thermal forcing is at about 100mW/m^2. This gives us about a century to stop increasing energy usage and albedo.
This is precisely where we were when people first started raising alarm bells about greenhouse gases.
The thermal emissivity of the night side of earth is only one of many limits we are running head first into. Almost all scarce resources, many abundant ones, and even abstract concepts like the growth of classical computation are all hitting limits where they only scale linearly or worse with energy input.
Growing into the solar system is largely irrelevant because it's a constant increase vs an exponential and will not be meaningfully coupled to earth's economy without energy expendature on earth proportional to trade volume. And there's no compelling reason to hinge everything on the assumption that the second law of thermodynamics and speed of light are both false so nothing outside the solar system is relevant to those living inside it unless we overturn one or both first.
All of this to avoid reexamining the blind faith assumption that we have to give an exponentially growing share of the pie to those who have the biggest share. Growth is only necessary for survival of the 99.99% if every year they give 2% of their wealth to the 0.01%
Once we build and make stuff truly not on earth it will decouple. The trade never reaches earth then, so overall human economy expands but not earth's (or only a little, ie high value trade, maybe even take some high waste energy processes off earth if energy from dropping product back is less).
The human economy could be much larger but not all parts of the human sphere would necessarily trade with each other materially.
Edit: "materially" in the sense of stuff. Some data from a nearby star could still be highly valuable, but exchanging stuff over lightyears might rarely be efficient.
I think part of the answer could be that the global population is older and wealthier than it ever has been. This has certain effects on our collective psychology.
It's certainly a thought provoking piece.
I'm wondering how stable the system is if all countries decide to degrowth, but one doesn't play ball. Naively you'd think that country would start to dominate economically/politically, so others may have to 'defect' as well... But maybe that's too simplistic.
Countries don't decide to degrowth -- people are certainly not willing, right now, to make such decisions. Other people make those decisions and force them on people.
> but one doesn't play ball.
And why wouldn't some country play ball, if not because it's better for it to keep growing and take advantage of other countries' partial suicides?
All of this is premised on there being a current, extreme urgency for degrowth. The debates on that are hardly settled.
Ah yes, compound interest, the magic that makes everything grow exponentially.
I do not believe the human mind can grasp exponential growth.
If compound interest is absolute then 3% interest over 2000 years is equivalent to colonizing every single planet, even the barren ones, in more than 50 trillion milkyways.
Even at the speed of light it will take 4 years to get to alpha centauri, you're not getting to the edge of the universe in 2000 years, the actually achievable interest rate must therefore be much lower than 3%, most likely closer to 0% than to 3%.
Before you argue that there will never be uninterrupted exponential growth, because of political instability and conflict, consider for a second that the inability to fulfill the endless exponential growth nonsense is the origin of the political instability and conflict.
Most growth comes from inventing new things that induce demand. E.g. computers becoming efficient enough to be in everyone's pocket means _everyone wants one in their pocket._ (and thus GDP line goes up)
Thus to continuously grow we need to continuously turn the earth-matter we have available into more and more valuable things. Certainly it's not infinite, but I doubt we need to colonize another planet to keep up current growth rate for many centuries, we just need to prioritize knowledge generation (and thus inventions that increase value) over consumption. This usually only occurs during wartime, when existential threats to nations mean that knowledge generation is essential to survival.
Not everything grows evenly at the same rate. You can have 20% growth in one area but 0% expansion in to the universe, like you suggest.
It's like people saying buying property now is a great idea because we have 10%+ annualized inflation. Just because the CPI is >10%, it doesn't follow that houses prices will grow in an increasing interest rate environment.
System complexity. Feedback loops. Human Behavior etc.
No, growth can’t go forever, but how far can it go? Obviously your trillion galaxies is absurd, but there’s a lot of room between absurd scenarios and where we are now.
But ultimately that does just push back the question of how to deal with flattening of the curve. Even if we settled the whole solar system ala The Expanse, then what? Solar system scale Japanese style stagnation?
I don't entirely agree that degrowth belong to the elite. I'm quite poor in a developed country and I'm for degrowth. So maybe I'm still part of the elite.
Anyway degrowth is going to create a lot of necessary poverty, which could be solved by the usual democracy to reduce that pesky inequality.
It's true that we never really reduced inequality, we just threw a lot of GDP.
Readit News
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp
On the ground, this has translated into flat or deflating prices (until very recently) and an increasing bifurcation of society into salarymen, with low but stable incomes anchored on jobs-almost-for-life, and part-timers on temporary contracts, with groups like single mothers living in poverty. Population is shrinking by close to 1M/year, the rural countryside is rapidly emptying out as young people flock into cities to chase opportunities, and the national pension scheme will sooner or later implode since it can't support 1 worker paying for 4 retirees forever. It's frankly depressing and there's no obvious way out.
Interestingly enough, the same is happening slowly in USA and UK, and then after a big space everywhere else. Note the anti-immigration and austerity rhetoric, where what is needed is a major social change, considering of some attempts to level the playing field and prevent the current corporate and political aristocracies from emerging again.
Aa for rural drain, it's been happening everywhere, mostly because for some reason we do not pay farmers enough, nor the systems we made allow even groups of then to be self sufficient.
From 2016 to 2060, the US is expected to grow by ~80M people [0], even though a big chunk of that growth (45%) will be for people who are 65 or older.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Because the US was created as a ragtag coalition of immigrants from all kinds of countries. Their whole shtick is based on being a melting pot. Japan is a much more ethnically homogenous nation.
Besides, this coming of immigrants didn't work so well for the natives in the US (the native Americans that is).
>No one talks about it (wouldn't be surprised if I got downvoted for mentioning it) but Japan is mad racist. They do not like foreigners.
Well, if they thought like that for my country, I wouldn't like them either.
"Not liking" people coming over is not the same as being racist, any more than a tribe in the Amazon not liking tourists or Americans/Europeans coming over to live with them would be "racist". They want to maintain their way of life, and that's up to them.
Besides, cultures which had seggregation up until the 60s, have a huge majority of blacks in jail even today, and routinely have cops kill them unarmed, shouldn't throw stones.
People talk about it all the time, especially on toxic forums filled with foreigners opining about Japan like r/japan. There are many reasons why immigration is not the silver bullet you think it is (some of which have been given by other replies). But the important thing is that Japan and the Japanese get to decide where to take their society and no one else. Telling the Japanese what they should do is arrogant paternalism.
Japan already has massive cities. It doesn't work.
We need economics that doesn't assume you can always go around the world taking other nations resources - including the people they have schooled and trained to provide for their own population.
Countries get richer, people move to small apartments in cities, birth rate drop below replacement.
Japan, China, Europe, Russia.
The US are less bad, people want to go there and the birth rate is not as bad (more suburbia?)
We are headed toward very different times with degrowth all over and a lot of infrastructure to maintain.
Here (Canada) ’we are hiring’ signs are everywhere a lot of places will close soon for lack of workers. Then the government funds will dry up (less income tax) at the moment they need it the most to support the aging population.
Japan is just a bit ahead of the rest of us.
Meanwhile in the US, H1B issuance is not only more onerous but only accepts some 30-40% of applicants last I checked. And this is the "specialty occupation" visa for skilled workers! Japan really seems like the easier country to immigrate to from what I've seen.
What happens when due to immigration or rising standards the immigration tap runs dry?
The US definitely isn't the shining example of "import whatever" people like to make it out to be. It just has the money and social structure to attract skilled workers far more easily.
Not lately. The immigration system is a mess full of perverse incentives, and was deliberately engineered that way in the mid-90s to maximize dysfunction.
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However, “no obvious way out” is incorrect. Increasing immigration (with citizenship) and supporting women having long term careers (as opposed to jobs-until-kids) are both quite obvious; they just involve societal changes that are, for now, unpalatable.
Immigration is slowly being forced open by economic need, but it's all very hush-hush (Vietnamese brought in as "trainees" to harvest lettuce below minimum wage etc) and intentionally offers no path to naturalization.
Is that a necessary result, or just a matter of how the economy was organized and money distributed? In other words, does politics and culture come into play in the result?
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> In 1985, there were 7 working-age people for each dependent elderly person. By 2010, that number had dropped all the way to 2.8. Moreover, it is projected to fall even further: to 1.7 in 2035 and 1.3 in 2060.
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a01001/
Sounds like the rest of the Western world. We're not living in such a capitalist utopia over here either, are we?
I think most of us on this forum are sheltered from how the rest of the developed world lives, with our 250k a year and private health insurance. Because from what I see here in Europe it's a temp worker world and single mothers living in almost poverty, with a welfare state close to bankruptcy.
We don't have the jobs for life, in that you might be fired out of the blue, so I don't know which is worse in this case.
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Both need growth in order to improve their conditions, and their place in society exists only because they can produce growth.
Without it the power of the wealthy over them would become a weight pressing down with such force that it would intolerable.
What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security. They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things. Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
edit: I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry.
These revealed preferences are hard to deny, and it would be quite presumptuous to impose a different trade-off on a plurality/majority of the populace.
I wouldn’t — and there’s been times I was quite hungry while homeless.
Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.
However, I believe that their lack of security is due to their lack of power, and that their lack of power is due to their lack of wealth, their loans and that they do not own the companies in which they work.
Consequently I see wealth and power as effectively the same and become moderately unhappy when I see policies that will in any way reduce the wealth or power of ordinary people.
So, while I used the word 'conditions' I actually meant their state of subjugation.
That's not for you to decide. The market can and does apply proper growth slowing pressure by itself.
> Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn.
That's just a different version of "think of the poor who can't eat". Countries and cultures aren't the same. Suburbia only exists due to improper distribution of business centers and housing bubbles. Overpopulated mega-cities don't have to exist with proper distribution of work and living space. Majority of countries are uninhabited and undeveloped.
> What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security.
Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.
> They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things.
Firing is necessary to keep efficiency and competition.
> Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.
Who will "supply security"? People who work and who are getting paid so they buy stuff. Who pays and produce their stuff? Other people who need to work. The demand for "security" will only keep increasing due to comfort. There's a reason Bill Clinton was elected on a platform to reform the welfare system.
> We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.
And flowers and unicorns too.
Dead Comment
Is this the only such ladder?
And why is it that economic growth seems to be the only ladder recognised in the economic mainstream for poverty alleviation?
The latter question is one that's addressed often in the writing and talks of Herman Daly, one example I've recently come across being a 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the CASSE podcast, which discusses Daly's work and academic heritage:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-steady-stater-7232427...
A more useful framing of the question might be to assume that degrowth is a given, whether you believe this or not, and proceed from there with a discussion of concerns.
The obvious advantage of growth over degrowth, or even steady-state economics, is that a larger pie allows portion sizes to increase (at least in theory --- actual history shows that both growth and absolute shrinkage have occurred, see particularly the introduction to Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms which notes that the richest and poorest people who've ever lived are alive now), without reallocation.
But wealth and livelihood allocation are social functions and constructs. A philosophy of commmon weal rather than personal gain might address this. It can be found in unexpected places, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, several times.
You go to your doctor and he says take these pills they will make your body grow bigger. As the leech gets bigger you must get bigger which means you must take more pills. If you stop taking the pills, the leech will outpace your body growth and your body will suffer from anemia despite having more blood in your body than the average healthy human.
Suddenly everyone gets a fetish for being as large as an possible, it is good for your health, nobody ever questions whether they should just get rid of the leech and get their body to a normal height.
Most older ladders were providing a lot of value to a few existing rulers, and concentrated the utility-allocating aspects of society in the hands of a few. And much of the value being provided was through violent seizure.
Or think about it this way, when there is no growth left, you must actually get people to cooperate with each other and as far as I know we never learned how to do that.
"r > g" societies are ones where the wealth is concentrating. This can be masked if g is positive and everyone else is also getting better off in absolute terms.
"r > (g=0)" is therefore one where the rich are getting richer in a zero sum way; because there isn't any growth, you can only make a fortune by taking it off other people.
"0 >= g > r" on the other hand looks extremely different from today: the return on capital is zero or negative. How can you invest in that environment? Negative interest rates? Negative retirement savings?
(My somewhat bleak conclusion is therefore "r > g > 0 will remain, but with increasing catastrophes that wipe out chunks of both r and g")
value is the realocation of wealth?
hmm, surely to realocate wealth has some value, but what's the relation between wealth and value?
also, what about rent? what does rent do to wealth? to growth? to value?
Why is that?
It is OK to take from the very rich to help the very poor.
All the stories I have read say that the general wealth is increasing but distribution getting more skewed.
So I do not think endless growth is the answer to maintaining the middle class
No, but it's antithetical to everything we think and believe for Capital to not take its profits before everyone else.
You might approach the footprint of a medium sized town if you built your own orbital lair and lived like a cyberpunk oligarch in space. Maybe.
Of course for some resources there is little difference at all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t eat much more than you do.
Money is not physical. Start redistributing physical stuff and you’ll find that soaking the rich barely makes a dent.
This piece runs about 10 pages printed, or roughly 5,000 words, which seems to challenge HN. And that's before considering that it's further discussing not one but four books, totalling over 1,000 pages.
I'd be quite interested in hearing from those who've read one or all of these, and if there were some way to invoke MacBeth's weird sisters, and agree when we three (or however many) should meet again to discuss them ... would be of interest.
There actually was a proposal for an HN book club ... 14 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407067
Any interest now, and suggestions on how to structure this, would be appreciated.
HN used to have book recommendation posts pretty often, but maybe we’ve gotten less literary over time. I’ve read about a dozen books that were recommended here and they were all awesome.
Thought I'd have that discussion here as well, though.
The earlier thread addresses a number of thoughts / concerns / possibilities.
There are groups for Metafilter and Econtalk and things.
Why not set up one there and advertise it on HN and select a book and see how it goes?
Degrowth seems to me like a vision of the future that assumes that humans should remain slaves of their environment and not become masters of it. If humans are to become the dominant species in the universe, degrowth will not help.
From my reading of degrowth works the answer is: because now the global resource use induced by growth have accumulated enourmous negative externality costs, costs that will nedlessly increase further unless counteracted by degrowth policy. Food shortages, deadly heatwaves, property destruction. Direct dire costs to human health and welfare and rippling secondary effects. For example how would a scenario with hundreds of millions of climate refugees play out on top of current global political tensions?
I see the degrowth view not as "we should never ever have growth again" but rather the current modes of growth have very tangible imminent (on an astronomical timescale) negative effects that we must deal with right now. If we fail to step up to the current challenge of provisioning health and welfare for beings on this planet how likely are we to manage an all universe encompassing expansion without it ending in catastrophe on the largest scale? You could see the climate change challenge, and the degrowth plan to tackle it, as a necessary step to get our house in order, before expanding out.
Us attempting to expand into and shaping the universe is quite a task - so much could go right or wrong. I think Toby Ord's The Precipice[0] has a very useful framework for thinking about such risks.
[0] https://theprecipice.com/
As far as dire scenarios are concerned, I struggle with them as usually the realities play out differently. Arguably in part because people do consider such scenarios.
This is precisely where we were when people first started raising alarm bells about greenhouse gases.
The thermal emissivity of the night side of earth is only one of many limits we are running head first into. Almost all scarce resources, many abundant ones, and even abstract concepts like the growth of classical computation are all hitting limits where they only scale linearly or worse with energy input.
Growing into the solar system is largely irrelevant because it's a constant increase vs an exponential and will not be meaningfully coupled to earth's economy without energy expendature on earth proportional to trade volume. And there's no compelling reason to hinge everything on the assumption that the second law of thermodynamics and speed of light are both false so nothing outside the solar system is relevant to those living inside it unless we overturn one or both first.
All of this to avoid reexamining the blind faith assumption that we have to give an exponentially growing share of the pie to those who have the biggest share. Growth is only necessary for survival of the 99.99% if every year they give 2% of their wealth to the 0.01%
Edit: "materially" in the sense of stuff. Some data from a nearby star could still be highly valuable, but exchanging stuff over lightyears might rarely be efficient.
Countries don't decide to degrowth -- people are certainly not willing, right now, to make such decisions. Other people make those decisions and force them on people.
> but one doesn't play ball.
And why wouldn't some country play ball, if not because it's better for it to keep growing and take advantage of other countries' partial suicides?
All of this is premised on there being a current, extreme urgency for degrowth. The debates on that are hardly settled.
I do not believe the human mind can grasp exponential growth.
If compound interest is absolute then 3% interest over 2000 years is equivalent to colonizing every single planet, even the barren ones, in more than 50 trillion milkyways.
Even at the speed of light it will take 4 years to get to alpha centauri, you're not getting to the edge of the universe in 2000 years, the actually achievable interest rate must therefore be much lower than 3%, most likely closer to 0% than to 3%.
Before you argue that there will never be uninterrupted exponential growth, because of political instability and conflict, consider for a second that the inability to fulfill the endless exponential growth nonsense is the origin of the political instability and conflict.
Most growth comes from inventing new things that induce demand. E.g. computers becoming efficient enough to be in everyone's pocket means _everyone wants one in their pocket._ (and thus GDP line goes up) Thus to continuously grow we need to continuously turn the earth-matter we have available into more and more valuable things. Certainly it's not infinite, but I doubt we need to colonize another planet to keep up current growth rate for many centuries, we just need to prioritize knowledge generation (and thus inventions that increase value) over consumption. This usually only occurs during wartime, when existential threats to nations mean that knowledge generation is essential to survival.
It's like people saying buying property now is a great idea because we have 10%+ annualized inflation. Just because the CPI is >10%, it doesn't follow that houses prices will grow in an increasing interest rate environment.
System complexity. Feedback loops. Human Behavior etc.
But ultimately that does just push back the question of how to deal with flattening of the curve. Even if we settled the whole solar system ala The Expanse, then what? Solar system scale Japanese style stagnation?
I don't entirely agree that degrowth belong to the elite. I'm quite poor in a developed country and I'm for degrowth. So maybe I'm still part of the elite.
Anyway degrowth is going to create a lot of necessary poverty, which could be solved by the usual democracy to reduce that pesky inequality.
It's true that we never really reduced inequality, we just threw a lot of GDP.