inasabaThe Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less: The degrowth movement wants to shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.
It’s not that radical, we lived with less than this for tens of thousands of years before the industrial revolution.
This sounds nice for someone in a developed country who has all they need, and is only satisfying their wants. But for most of the world, economic development is a necessity and a lifesaver. Child mortality is reduced, life expectancy and education level increased, child labor decreased, as a country’s economy grows. This is not a fringe right-wing idea. This is the very real effect of economic growth in developing countries, i.e. most of the world.
Degrowthers often seem to forget that applying their ideas will literally kill millions in developing countries, by preventing the economic developments that would have saved them.
FWIW, I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism either but think that it is important to consider science in important matters like this and not just go with gut feeling. That applies to both fascism and degrowth.
It seems like the choice is to die from the environmental issues or die from poor health care? There is no way anyone survives with the current state of things.
I think a more fair take is that we need growth in underdeveloped places and degrowth in highly developed places. It’s less about changing the total economic output and more about changing how that output is distributed.
No, it’s about how much carbon we are putting I to the atmosphere. Pretty simple issue actually.
Which is a direct function of development. All of Africa produces less CO2 than Alabama, and Alabama is the least developed state in the developed world.
Degrowth addresses that, contrary to your opinion. Degrowth in the global north provides the space for the global south to properly develop, something that has been systematically denied to them in many places by western powers through unequal exchange and neocolonialism.
gowanExcept a vast portion of the global south, particularly equatorial areas, cannot develop too much or should not be developed too much because they are increasingly becoming less capable of sustaining life.
Sure, so I imagine you’re also of the opinion that Texas should not be allowed to develop any more, that they must refuse any new immigrants, and all Texans must move to other states, right?
Im of the mind we shouldn’t rebuild Galveston, New Orleans etc because we will only need to rebuild them again. It might be more like the bottom two thirds of the USA that become difficult to inhabit depending on temperature changes and sea level rise.
Ideally we would be preparing most of the north, especially the states with large spaces and water sources to take on the tens to hundreds of millions of immigrants that will be heading that way over the decades.
I feel that, it will be interesting to see how the global climate refugee crisis will go when western countries like the US start having millions of migrants. I think it’s going to be crazy, so much of the west is already bigoted against refugees overall, will they turn that inward and create a class of undesirables who live in shanty towns? Will the state step up and spend the billions of dollars it requires to properly create places for all these people? It’s gonna be a crazy few decades.
I think this is why some are pushing fascism. They see the wave of immigrants coming and rather than prepare their society to adapt they seek to exclude with a police state.
How does degrowth in the northern hemisphere give space to the southern hemisphere? Are we going to relocate the Amazon rainforest or something?
Lmao no but that’s a great mental image. Global north and south don’t exclusively refer to northern and southern hemisphere. Though, rewilding is a component of most degrowth strategies I’ve encountered. Obviously it’s much more complicated than just planting trees, entire ecosystems would need to be developed, but I guess sort of in a way it would be like moving the Amazon to the northern hemisphere, only that degrowth would advocate for redeveloping underdeveloped areas in the global south rather than further damaging wild ecosystems to develop more sprawl.
I still do not fully understand it, but thank you for the response.
Its often includes with a more holistic approach to restructuring society. Degrowth is only a part of the puzzle a lot of radicals are advocating for in order to combat climate change. A lot of proponents of degrowth also call for a solarpunk style of city planning, decentralized/libertarian (real libertarian) politics and plenty more
Noble ShiftYou don’t need to wait, you can start this now on your own. Is it easy? F*ck no. Can it be done? Yes, and once you are used to it, it’s a great way to live.
For real. It’s the same with food.
Not that I eat healthy… Because I’m practically underweight so I’ll generally eat anything. But after eating organic for awhile in the past I definitely favor fresh healthy over junk food.
Same with my room/home… It’s so much easier when you only have less to take care of.
Hell yes it’s a great way to live.
If we implement government policies that incentivize simple living, and tax wasteful living exponentially, it’s going to benefit individuals.
Wealthy people will be better off from having most of their wealth taxed because they’ll have a more enjoyable simple lifestyle.
possibly a catAnd you’ll be a better person for it. There’s nothing like putting theory into practice. Even if you don’t make a difference to anyone else, you’ll make a difference for yourself.
Eh, humans are hardwired to acquire stuff. This will never catch on. It’d be cool if it did. But it won’t.
0x1C3B00DAI disagree that we're hardwired to acquire stuff. But even if we are, we're sentient beings who overcome a lot of things we're hardwired to do, so that is just one more thing we should be aware of about our own thinking.
RozaŭtunoEh, humans are hardwired to acquire stuff
[Citation needed]
It won’t happen because the ones interested in keeping us convinced we’re hardwired to acquire stuff would not want it, and they’re the ones in control.
Ascetics exist. Minimalists exist. Fuck, Marie Kondo exists. The desire for stuff is not some immutable force like gravity. It’s just what we’ve been taught by the ones selling the stuff.
Macroeconomics student moment
Humans are hard wired to take care of each other. You’re mistaking human nature with materialism.
But hey, do you doomer.
Humans are also hardwired to be adaptable and survive in many many circumstances. Materialism is one such circumstance. If this movement gains momentum and the world actually changes because of it humans will adapt again and survive.
The problem is that survival in these circumstances seems to depend on the continuation of it for all those in it, which leads to heavy resistance to changing the circumstances we’ve adapted to. It requires us to look beyond what we know and work towards the greater good with little guarantee that this will work out for ourselves individually within our own lives even if we know it’ll be good for everybody in the long term. Therefore, it goes against that innate survival instinct.
I truly believe that the only way out of this dumpster fire of a world we live in depends on changing those “fundamentals” (big word, seeing how materialism is relatively recent to mankind and is only fundamental as long as the majority believes it is and keeps the charade going) but in the short term it means going against the instinct to persevere and stay in the rat race, because stepping out of the race to live by new rules while the rest is undecided or flat out decides to simply keep running is going to set you back within the confines of the “old rules”.
naturalistic fallacy intensifies
Even if people were “hard wired” to do bad things, a system that encourages those bad things is a worse system.
This belongs in a capitalist propaganda bingo card
Nope. That’s just you.
ParsnipWitchMaterialism could also in part be the result of a lack in other areas that humans are hardwired for. Community, emotional care, daydreaming, …
Human nature is sculpted and shaped by the material conditions around you, it’s not something immutable and forever the same.
If a society is built around endless accumulation then of course it would be considered only natural to most.
After all, if you were born and lived your whole life in a coal mine, you’d say it’s human nature to cough.
How would business work? Currently a business’s purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?
And how is trying to add less value more effective than internalizing externalized costs? For example, co2 is an externalized cost, one companies don’t need to pay for right now, it’s external to them. If we made them pay for it to fund carbon capture at 1 ton removed for every 1 ton emitted, they would decrease their emissions and the rest would be removed. You could do something similar for other ecological issues as well. What’s the benefit of degroth over internalizing?
Chetzemoka"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
Hmm interesting. Thank you!
They do have an obligation to what their share holders want though don’t they?
Maybe part of degrowth would be fewer public companies beholden to shareholders.
Private companies are still beholden to their owners. Would the alternative be government ownership?
Co-op structures could work too.
In co-ops the employees have a controlling interest, right? So a majority of them would still need to want to shrink the company. That might be easier to convince them than investors though.
True, it would still need to be based off the cooperative ideas. There was an awesome forestry co-op in the 70-90's called the Hoedad's that had an interesting model and had each section ran as separate crews with even different pay structures and even philosophical structures. They did tree replanting and brush cutting and many other activities but each sub group bid contacts independently but we're part of the workers cooperative collectively.
If the shareholders want the corporation to blatantly violate the law, they don't do that. They don't have to do everything that shareholders want. Shareholders are perfectly free to sell their shares, if they don't like what a company is doing, or to vote out members of the board, if they don't like the way the company is being managed. The idea that corporations have no other choice is a myth perpetuated to maintain the status quo
hoodatninjaHow would business work? Currently a business’s purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?
Is the law "a business must make as much money as possible at all times with absolutely no consideration for literally anything else"?
A business can absolutely exist to be self-sustaining and not "always make record profits." You can break even, you can have slow but steady growth. Where is this legal mandate to red line it at all times?
I ran a business for 7 years. Didn't realize I was violating the law the whole time.
I was confusing an obligation to shareholders with an obligation to profit. So if a share holder majority want maximized profit, I think the company needs to do it.
That's not how companies are structured. The CEO does have some power and say and can argue his position. This idea of shareholders just screaming at a CEO going "MORE MORE FASTER FASTER" is both true and false. Under that paradigm how could we wind up with, say, Tom's Shoes? We can critique them all day (there is a lot to critique) but they literally give away one pair of shoes for every pair sold. That's not maximized profit in the short term, it's a long term play. That has value.
But the shareholders can replace members who are not acting what they perceive to be their best interest, right? It seems like eventually the company will conform to what the share holders want.
It seems like if a CEO publicly said they were shrinking the company to benefit the environment, they’d be replaced by the shareholders pretty quickly.
But the shareholders can replace members who are not acting what they perceive to be their best interest, right?
Yes but you make it sound like they're ordering a sandwich. Removing a CEO is a big deal and can have huge repercussions. You need to make sure the reasons are good enough, and "we didn't make quite as much money" is not enough to move most boards.
It seems like if a CEO publicly said they were shrinking the company to benefit the environment, they’d be replaced by the shareholders pretty quickly.
That completely depends on the company and how they're doing it.
Easy, just get society to treat those people for what they are… Greedy selfish inhumane criminals.
BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]Please think of the companies! Won’t anyone think of the poor profit motive?!
Is degroth individual or government driven? If it’s individual, I’m all for it. If it’s government, I think there are more effective ways of helping the environment than telling businesses to not make money.
Yes individual actions are the best and most effective way to deal with collective problems.
Obviously companies making money has no impact on the environment either
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
Remember, you said it in your comment, “… a business’s purpose by law is to make money.” The business doesn’t pay the cost, the worker pay the cost.
Your example of carbon capture is great, a “business” starts up doing carbon capture. They make their money by selling carbon credits to other businesses, NOT to clean up their act and stop polluting but to “offset” their carbon emissions. If my business produces more pollution, I just buy more credits and pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Like, if I poop in your kitchen sink every day, but I buy a “poop free kitchen sink credits” to offset that I poop in your kitchen sink every day that says “somewhere else there is a kitchen sink free of poop that will cancel out that I’ve pooped in this sink today,” … I’m still pooping in your kitchen sink.
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
That’s fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
The poop in the sink example isn’t applicable to carbon emissions. Co2 dilutes very quickly, so it’s all essentially going into one big reservoir. The equivalent then is for everyone to be pooping in one big pile. I don’t care in that case whether you don’t poop in the pile or you pay someone else to take one poop’s worth of poop out of the pile somewhere else. The pile stays the same size. The overall quantity is what matters for co2.
You might have a point though for externalities like resource extraction or habitat destruction. That’s harder to quantity if the degradation of one area can be offset by the improvement of another. That’s a much more variable exchange, so it’d be more difficult to work trades on those. But governments have been able to mostly figure it out for things like national forests, logging, and hydraulic fluid spills. So I don’t think it’s impossible.
pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Exec’s don’t have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it. It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
That’s fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
Why should we give money to rich parasites that contribute nothing when we could just nationalize their “business” and run it at a loss? Why must everything have a profit motive?
Because a profit motive does much better for efficiency. Government run things are not known for their efficiency and innovation.
Plus the government is very inefficient deciding how to delegate resources. Democracy isn’t able to get a lot of information from everyone about their exact priorities and desires without extreme expenditure. But people can show how much they value some services over others by how much they’re willing to pay, doing prioritisation automatically.
I would be in favor of nationalizing some industries where free market forces don’t work, for example healthcare or Internet. But free markets with profit motives are very efficient.
And I claim that they can be moral if the external costs of immorality are internalized. Make a business pay exorbitantly for being bad, and they’ll stop being bad.
Do you have any actual proof that the profit motive has any positive links to innovation, or are you just taking it for granted? The first cell phone was invented in the USSR, while Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1, to name two counter-examples. What innovations have come from the profit motive?
Likewise, I doubt the claims of market efficiency. 10% of Americans were food insecure in 2021. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. To me, this is a drastic failing of resource allocation in the richest country on earth. When push came to shove during WWII, even the US ran their war industry as a command economy because corporate graft could not be tolerated in an existential crisis. Socialist countries consistently outperform similar capitalist nations; compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation (or even China to India; while I assume we would disagree about what China’s doing, I think we would agree that it’s more government-directed than US-style “free-market capitalism”).
I’m curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you. Surely it’s not just to do with profitability, as you give healthcare as an example. Is it to do with how essential something is? If it’s the latter, then surely that would justify the nationalization of food, decommodification of housing, etc.
To your point of “regulate businesses to ensure good behavior”, surely you must realize the reason we don’t already have those regulations are that private businesses bribe politicians to prevent such regulations.
Exec’s don’t have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it.
How many different gas stations do you see during your daily travels? Are the prices all over the place or are they the same? What are the price differences between different manufacturers of the same type of TV? They’re all pretty much the same with one or two very high end or very low end models being the exception. There won’t be much price competition because that hurts businesses, if one of your business peers raises their prices you are now under pressure to RAISE your prices so that you’re not loosing potential profits.
I’m pretty sure that manufacturing any particular type of thing or extracting any particular type of resource will produce the same amount of environmental degradation regardless of which company’s name is on the paperwork. Exxon doesn’t have some special way to extract oil that is better for the envrioment than the one ConocoPhillips uses. So there won’t be any competition that way.
It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no. Decreasing emissions means a company is pumping less oil or making less iPhones or selling less gasoline. This gives a company’s competitors who aren’t decreasing their production a way to capture its market share because somebody else will still have product to sell to meet the demand.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no.
It’s never directly correlated. You can always transport by ship instead of plane or use more local resources or use less material. There’s always efficiency that can be squeezed out of a system, and a company that doesn’t pursue cost efficiency in that area will fall behind. But right now there’s no reason to do so.
Are the prices all over the place or are they the same?
Gas or the food things?
Often the prices are all the same because the higher cost ones have gone out of business or adapted to the lower cost method. Price fixing (which is what you’re describing) is hard to do when there is a lot of competition, since any one company can disrupt the whole thing and make more money because of it. But it is more likely were competition is scarce. In duopolies or similarly few players, they can price fix more easily. That’s why I am in favor of nationalizing industries like that, or at least they need more oversight.
And the extra poverty and misery this will cause?
Rich people missing out on more profits is not the same thing as poverty.