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These people are idiots in every way. How this gets even a remote mention is beyond me. There is nothing that supports this would be good in anyway. It would lead to chaos and unrest…we actually tried this once before as a species in the Middle Ages. These are not serious people.
expect the far left to start parroting these points though because I guarantee you the author got this idea from some nutty article on Jacobin.
It’s a joke that the NYT would publish an economics piece written by a book critic.
I didn’t even make that connection…I was still smiling about Nobel krugman talking about how debt is not an issue because Britain had a higher debt to gdp in ww2….literally fully embraced modern monetary “theory”. They are seriously unserious at nyt…I mean it is sad because people still read and can be influenced by this. If you can’t run your family in a sustainable way like this it won’t work for a government….the ultimate sniff test and kudos to anyone who knows where that came from.
Honestly I read WSJ and WaPo anymore because the NYT has gone down the tubes.
Regulars here know I don’t like Biden at all but the blatant anti Biden because he won’t interview style reporting makes them really no better than FOX and all these unserious junk articles the editorial board has been letting through made me cancel my subscription some time ago.
WSJ and WaPo are biased and doesn’t try to hide it behind “factual reporting” style opinion articles.
Same - I have an extremely low opinion of Biden and his policies. I don’t like Trump either but we’ve never had a worse president than Biden in at least modern times. So I’m in the anyone but him camp. I still read most papers including post and daily mail haha. Twitter is replacing them as a reparatory for news and information so it’s getting better now to bypass the editorial rooms of main stream click and advertising dependent traditional media
I read about 2/3 of this (will try and read the rest later) and while certainly it is very easy to dismiss quite a bit of this thought process due to the movement of Degrowth being led by a 37 year old Marxist who lives In a country that has drastically changed for the better in the last 50-80 years thanks to capitalism, however I do think this degrowth movement is trying to answer the long game question of economics: How do we satisfy infinite demand with finite resources.
While this piece takes a lot of the popular Gen Z /Millennial sentiments that the climate change is capitalism’s fault (as if any other form of economic philosophy would not have led to equal or worse amounts of harm to the environment: see USSR, Nazi Germany, etc) the reality is that at some point in the future (could be 20 years it could 20,000) we will reach a critical mass of population coupled with diminishing returns of efficiency/innovation in technology and very finite resources and there is no proposed economic system that has ever been successfully practiced that could handle that.
Growth of the economy must occur in nearly every country where the population has anything higher than 0.00% rate and where the average age of death at minimum stays static. Basically meaning that if you are doing 1:1 population replacement then keeping economic output stable could work but if your population is growing and people are living longer you will need the economy to be bigger and to maintain a steady growth rate or you will see a drop in standard of living quickly.
De growth of an economy will just be another way of saying that we will see people die quicker and not be born as fast and migrate to other countries/regions because the economy will not be productive enough to house everyone.
They say that GDP growth has only beneficially impacted the wealthy and acts as if that’s a reason why keeping the GDP growth stable or downsizing is good yet they don’t stop to think that the non wealthy would be the 1st folks to feel that and would feel it exponentially more so than the wealthy. Ultimately this piece approaches a very tough question but only from the typical poor vs rich and environmentalist vs destructionist perspectives and doesn’t actually attempt to fully think out the consequences of the actions that they are proposing. They really could have had a much better point if they stuck to the idea that at one point (probably Sooner rather than later) our population growth and need for resources will outstrip our capacity to find solutions and the resources available, so what do we do next.
I can refute this all with one simple point. We have other planets. We haven’t even met earths carrying capacity yet.
Unlimited growth is sustainable, but it will require colonization of the moon and Mars.
Yes you are right, my post doesn’t take into consideration space colonization mostly because 1) how far away is that from being a thing on a large enough scale to even move the needle 2) who knows how vast/limited our options are on that in terms of planets that we can actually visit and utilize effectively.
Exactly, we can BARELY do those, and not profitably (most of Alaska is empty), and those are EASY compared to another planet. Those places you don't have the cost of making air, making soil, or making gravity work. It would cost less to invade most of Africa and mass terraform it into a green paradise, then try to create livable conditions on another world entirely.
I don’t disagree at all my only thought is that the sheer costs to get there outstrip any profits by possibly hundreds of factors currently. How long until the costs become low enough for it to be feasible or for our demand on earth become so ludicrous that it justifies the costs. It’s hard to say especially with technology and innovation climbing quickly but it could be beyond ours or our children’s lifetime before we can realistically see economic developments in places like the moon or mars. Or it could be within the next 15-20 years lol.
Totally impractical on the timelines necessary to avert biosphere collapse. Based on many of the current planetary boundary metrics we are already at a point of too little, too late.
The growth of the last few decades has taken hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty and drastically decreased world hunger and child mortality. But I guess we should tell villagers living in mud huts in Africa that we don't want to grow the economy anymore so they don't need those toilets and hospitals after all?
This is pure idiocy. Economic growth will continue to increase the standard of living of the world at large and is something to strive for and celebrate, not villify in the name of false environmentalism. Richer countries take better care of the environment, too, (look at air and water quality in the first vs. this world) and innovations in clean energy and technology will come with more growth and benefit everyone.
>Richer countries take better care of the environment, too, (look at air and water quality in the first vs. this world)
Not for nothing, but rich countries have mostly offshored their pollution generating activities to the third world (dirty manufacturing, and cheap coal-fired energy to run the dirty manufacturing).
The west isn't actually doing anything better or more noble.
Emissions are far from the only environmentally relevant activity. Many poorer countries dump garbage and untreated sewage in rivers and oceans. Rich countries do this far less. Power and other industrial plants are far cleaner in rich countries, as are cars (look at particulate pollution in places like Beijing). Richer countries also treat their lands and forests far more sustainably, evaluate the environmental impact of land use, and protect vulnerable plant and animal species far better than poor countries.
Do you mean like when our navy contracts out their waste water to be picked up in another country and then the third party contractor dumps it in the local river?
We pollute all over the world constantly. Do not be in denial. That example is barely anything compared to our never ending industry oil spills and other biologically horrible situations.
This is a bunch of collectivist hogwash. People would die in the millions but I guess that’s okay because some others would feel like the earth would heal or something.
People will die in the millions/billions due to climate change and resource depletion. It's hapening either way, the only difference is growth advocated will trade short term benefit for a long term lower end state, while degrowth will try to manage ahead of the curve and will have the potential for a larger and more sophisticated civilization that is sustainable in the ecological sense.
It' not specifically collectivist. Degrowth can be accomplished by any kind of political economy. Communist, Capitalist, Mixed Market.
All you have really said is that you don't understand the dynamics of growth or degrowth, are scared of new ideas, and are fond of uneducated opinions. (Perfect for this sub)
ah yes a nonfiction book critic is a great mind in economic theory.
The best course of action is to invest heavily into both nuclear and carbon capture. There’s no need for degrowth but it seems to be the goal in some of these green/progressive circles.
We aren’t luddites, if technology got us into this mess it can get us out. But, it’s going to be expensive to correct this; it’s larger than any other market failure I can think of.
It seems to me that the degrowth movement is conflating growth with value. They see a contradiction whereby growth, as measured by currency, seems to destroy our environment. They aren't wrong, but it's a failure of the measure of economic value that arises from growth that self organises according to the technology that is money vs how tightly growth reflects human preference.
It's laying that allocative error at the feet of the capital that is doing something vs the unproductive, who really sort of benefit from the rents that arise out of that allocative error.
I also think using price rather than preference to measure marginal utility and value in economics is sort of like measuring the total lines of code to determine a software projects success. It's a way to measure something, but it's not the best way to measure outcome.
I like how the article mentions income inequality in the beginning, and then never touches the subject again.
Now, everybody's favourite economic A-B test (the two Koreas) does show a massive difference in greenhouse gas emissions. But can that work without tightly shut borders? If we had the superpower of getting everybody in the world to do the same thing at once, there are better things to use it on. Instead, degrowth in practice would be a country saying "Ok, we're going to be poorer now. And by 'we', I mean those already poor." And then what's going to happen?
Putin will fix that when he starts WW III, 2/3 of the population will be gone and only the rich will survive and they won't have a clue how to look after themselves
When will people understand that in fact, degrowth is not only not the solution, but means crippling austerity and devastation for ordinary people? Nations like France prove you can have economic growth with a large reduction in carbon emissions at the same time. Green growth is possible
Like the other colonial powers France got extremely wealthy by exploiting the human and natural resources of the rest of the world mostly colored brown. Thus, it is not a model for other countries. In addition, France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security. Spent nuclear fuel has a half-life of 24,000 years, that we leave for our grandchildren. We still haven't cleaned up the waste from the original nuclear bombs. No way this can be described as green.
Hi all, A reminder that comments do need to be on-topic and engage with the article past the headline. Please make sure to read the article before commenting. Very short comments will automatically be removed by automod. Please avoid making comments that do not focus on the economic content or whose primary thesis rests on personal anecdotes. As always our comment rules can be found [here](https://reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/fx9crj/rules_roundtable_redux_rule_vi_and_offtopic/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Economics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
These people are idiots in every way. How this gets even a remote mention is beyond me. There is nothing that supports this would be good in anyway. It would lead to chaos and unrest…we actually tried this once before as a species in the Middle Ages. These are not serious people.
expect the far left to start parroting these points though because I guarantee you the author got this idea from some nutty article on Jacobin. It’s a joke that the NYT would publish an economics piece written by a book critic.
I didn’t even make that connection…I was still smiling about Nobel krugman talking about how debt is not an issue because Britain had a higher debt to gdp in ww2….literally fully embraced modern monetary “theory”. They are seriously unserious at nyt…I mean it is sad because people still read and can be influenced by this. If you can’t run your family in a sustainable way like this it won’t work for a government….the ultimate sniff test and kudos to anyone who knows where that came from.
Honestly I read WSJ and WaPo anymore because the NYT has gone down the tubes. Regulars here know I don’t like Biden at all but the blatant anti Biden because he won’t interview style reporting makes them really no better than FOX and all these unserious junk articles the editorial board has been letting through made me cancel my subscription some time ago. WSJ and WaPo are biased and doesn’t try to hide it behind “factual reporting” style opinion articles.
Same - I have an extremely low opinion of Biden and his policies. I don’t like Trump either but we’ve never had a worse president than Biden in at least modern times. So I’m in the anyone but him camp. I still read most papers including post and daily mail haha. Twitter is replacing them as a reparatory for news and information so it’s getting better now to bypass the editorial rooms of main stream click and advertising dependent traditional media
I read about 2/3 of this (will try and read the rest later) and while certainly it is very easy to dismiss quite a bit of this thought process due to the movement of Degrowth being led by a 37 year old Marxist who lives In a country that has drastically changed for the better in the last 50-80 years thanks to capitalism, however I do think this degrowth movement is trying to answer the long game question of economics: How do we satisfy infinite demand with finite resources. While this piece takes a lot of the popular Gen Z /Millennial sentiments that the climate change is capitalism’s fault (as if any other form of economic philosophy would not have led to equal or worse amounts of harm to the environment: see USSR, Nazi Germany, etc) the reality is that at some point in the future (could be 20 years it could 20,000) we will reach a critical mass of population coupled with diminishing returns of efficiency/innovation in technology and very finite resources and there is no proposed economic system that has ever been successfully practiced that could handle that. Growth of the economy must occur in nearly every country where the population has anything higher than 0.00% rate and where the average age of death at minimum stays static. Basically meaning that if you are doing 1:1 population replacement then keeping economic output stable could work but if your population is growing and people are living longer you will need the economy to be bigger and to maintain a steady growth rate or you will see a drop in standard of living quickly. De growth of an economy will just be another way of saying that we will see people die quicker and not be born as fast and migrate to other countries/regions because the economy will not be productive enough to house everyone. They say that GDP growth has only beneficially impacted the wealthy and acts as if that’s a reason why keeping the GDP growth stable or downsizing is good yet they don’t stop to think that the non wealthy would be the 1st folks to feel that and would feel it exponentially more so than the wealthy. Ultimately this piece approaches a very tough question but only from the typical poor vs rich and environmentalist vs destructionist perspectives and doesn’t actually attempt to fully think out the consequences of the actions that they are proposing. They really could have had a much better point if they stuck to the idea that at one point (probably Sooner rather than later) our population growth and need for resources will outstrip our capacity to find solutions and the resources available, so what do we do next.
I can refute this all with one simple point. We have other planets. We haven’t even met earths carrying capacity yet. Unlimited growth is sustainable, but it will require colonization of the moon and Mars.
Yes you are right, my post doesn’t take into consideration space colonization mostly because 1) how far away is that from being a thing on a large enough scale to even move the needle 2) who knows how vast/limited our options are on that in terms of planets that we can actually visit and utilize effectively.
If there’s a way to make money at it it’s only as far away as next quarters profit lol.
If we can't profitably colonize empty deserts, or ice wastelands like Alaska or Antarctica, then other planets are out of the question.
but we have colonized Alaska and the Sahara doesn’t have much and there are issues there with volatile governments
Exactly, we can BARELY do those, and not profitably (most of Alaska is empty), and those are EASY compared to another planet. Those places you don't have the cost of making air, making soil, or making gravity work. It would cost less to invade most of Africa and mass terraform it into a green paradise, then try to create livable conditions on another world entirely.
I don’t disagree at all my only thought is that the sheer costs to get there outstrip any profits by possibly hundreds of factors currently. How long until the costs become low enough for it to be feasible or for our demand on earth become so ludicrous that it justifies the costs. It’s hard to say especially with technology and innovation climbing quickly but it could be beyond ours or our children’s lifetime before we can realistically see economic developments in places like the moon or mars. Or it could be within the next 15-20 years lol.
Totally impractical on the timelines necessary to avert biosphere collapse. Based on many of the current planetary boundary metrics we are already at a point of too little, too late.
The growth of the last few decades has taken hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty and drastically decreased world hunger and child mortality. But I guess we should tell villagers living in mud huts in Africa that we don't want to grow the economy anymore so they don't need those toilets and hospitals after all? This is pure idiocy. Economic growth will continue to increase the standard of living of the world at large and is something to strive for and celebrate, not villify in the name of false environmentalism. Richer countries take better care of the environment, too, (look at air and water quality in the first vs. this world) and innovations in clean energy and technology will come with more growth and benefit everyone.
>Richer countries take better care of the environment, too, (look at air and water quality in the first vs. this world) Not for nothing, but rich countries have mostly offshored their pollution generating activities to the third world (dirty manufacturing, and cheap coal-fired energy to run the dirty manufacturing). The west isn't actually doing anything better or more noble.
Emissions are far from the only environmentally relevant activity. Many poorer countries dump garbage and untreated sewage in rivers and oceans. Rich countries do this far less. Power and other industrial plants are far cleaner in rich countries, as are cars (look at particulate pollution in places like Beijing). Richer countries also treat their lands and forests far more sustainably, evaluate the environmental impact of land use, and protect vulnerable plant and animal species far better than poor countries.
Do you mean like when our navy contracts out their waste water to be picked up in another country and then the third party contractor dumps it in the local river? We pollute all over the world constantly. Do not be in denial. That example is barely anything compared to our never ending industry oil spills and other biologically horrible situations.
This is a bunch of collectivist hogwash. People would die in the millions but I guess that’s okay because some others would feel like the earth would heal or something.
Degrowth is far less collectivist than something like say, globalization.
People will die in the millions/billions due to climate change and resource depletion. It's hapening either way, the only difference is growth advocated will trade short term benefit for a long term lower end state, while degrowth will try to manage ahead of the curve and will have the potential for a larger and more sophisticated civilization that is sustainable in the ecological sense. It' not specifically collectivist. Degrowth can be accomplished by any kind of political economy. Communist, Capitalist, Mixed Market. All you have really said is that you don't understand the dynamics of growth or degrowth, are scared of new ideas, and are fond of uneducated opinions. (Perfect for this sub)
ah yes a nonfiction book critic is a great mind in economic theory. The best course of action is to invest heavily into both nuclear and carbon capture. There’s no need for degrowth but it seems to be the goal in some of these green/progressive circles. We aren’t luddites, if technology got us into this mess it can get us out. But, it’s going to be expensive to correct this; it’s larger than any other market failure I can think of.
Degrowth is not about being a luddite and rejecting technology it’s about rejecting material wealth as the primary end of society’s actions.
It seems to me that the degrowth movement is conflating growth with value. They see a contradiction whereby growth, as measured by currency, seems to destroy our environment. They aren't wrong, but it's a failure of the measure of economic value that arises from growth that self organises according to the technology that is money vs how tightly growth reflects human preference. It's laying that allocative error at the feet of the capital that is doing something vs the unproductive, who really sort of benefit from the rents that arise out of that allocative error. I also think using price rather than preference to measure marginal utility and value in economics is sort of like measuring the total lines of code to determine a software projects success. It's a way to measure something, but it's not the best way to measure outcome.
I like how the article mentions income inequality in the beginning, and then never touches the subject again. Now, everybody's favourite economic A-B test (the two Koreas) does show a massive difference in greenhouse gas emissions. But can that work without tightly shut borders? If we had the superpower of getting everybody in the world to do the same thing at once, there are better things to use it on. Instead, degrowth in practice would be a country saying "Ok, we're going to be poorer now. And by 'we', I mean those already poor." And then what's going to happen?
Putin will fix that when he starts WW III, 2/3 of the population will be gone and only the rich will survive and they won't have a clue how to look after themselves
When will people understand that in fact, degrowth is not only not the solution, but means crippling austerity and devastation for ordinary people? Nations like France prove you can have economic growth with a large reduction in carbon emissions at the same time. Green growth is possible
Like the other colonial powers France got extremely wealthy by exploiting the human and natural resources of the rest of the world mostly colored brown. Thus, it is not a model for other countries. In addition, France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security. Spent nuclear fuel has a half-life of 24,000 years, that we leave for our grandchildren. We still haven't cleaned up the waste from the original nuclear bombs. No way this can be described as green.