Capitalism is based on the cancerous logic of perpetual expansion, devastating the living world. In the face of ecological breakdown, we need to restore the ...
So I didn’t watch the video (I prefer to get my serious information in old-fashioned text form) but the topic at least has me thinking about degrowth.
Whenever I read about this theory, it’s typically presented in terms of GDP, “We need to reduce our GDP,” “We need to stop using GDP as a measure of progress,” etc. But it seems to me that GDP isn’t really the right topic. Is it not resource consumption that is the real target? Water, energy, food, steel, concrete, and so on.
This seems an important distinction to me in that GDP has several significant factors, including labor, productive capital (machines/factories), and knowledge, in addition to material inputs. You could, for example dramatically reduce GDP by bombing factories or suppressing technical knowledge. This would be a disaster in terms of human well-being, but also in terms of degrowth’s own objectives in that productive capital and technical knowledge enable more goods to be produced with less input resources in many cases.
Further, it is conceivable for it to occur that a breakthrough in technical knowledge would allow more valuable goods or services to be produced using fewer resources, and result in a situation where both GDP is going up, and resource consumption is going down. There are probably good, real examples of such technologies. The information revolution of the end of the 20th century is probably one of them.
It’s possible that this is more thoughtfully considered in the literature (I’m not terribly well-read on this topic) and I’d be interested in some good references in this direction. If not, I think many of the criticisms of degrowth are probably sound. I think it is unnecessary and undesirable to reduce the quality of life for the majority of people in order to create an economic system compatible with the real limits of ecological resources, and focusing on reducing GDP risks causing that.
If the focus is actually resource consumption, as I think it should be, then I think the rhetoric around GDP, and even the name degrowth, is misleading and unappealing to most people. It seems to me that the operative word ought to be efficiency. Doing more with less. In that view the path forward looks more like investing heavily in R&D, rearchitecting urban infrastructure, and driving down water, energy, and land usage per capita. GDP hardly seems relevant.
So yes the real target is to stay within planetary boundaries and to shut down problematic industries as quickly as possible, to increase the quality of life over the long term. The key with GDP is that degrowth argues that GDP is a flawed metric for quality of life. For example when you work less, you reduce GDP, but have more free time, which might improve your life even more then the extra work income. The problem is that 32 out of 116 countries have actually managed to decouple GDP growth from emissions and those are nearly all developed countries, which have way to high emissions already and the fall in emissions is pretty low. The argument is that we can provide a good quality of life for everybody on the planet, while staying within planetary boundaries, by cutting wastefull practises and using resources in a more targeted way. For example by using bicycles instead of cars, which are more expensive to produce and also use a lot more oil.
So I didn’t watch the video (I prefer to get my serious information in old-fashioned text form) but the topic at least has me thinking about degrowth.
Whenever I read about this theory, it’s typically presented in terms of GDP, “We need to reduce our GDP,” “We need to stop using GDP as a measure of progress,” etc. But it seems to me that GDP isn’t really the right topic. Is it not resource consumption that is the real target? Water, energy, food, steel, concrete, and so on.
This seems an important distinction to me in that GDP has several significant factors, including labor, productive capital (machines/factories), and knowledge, in addition to material inputs. You could, for example dramatically reduce GDP by bombing factories or suppressing technical knowledge. This would be a disaster in terms of human well-being, but also in terms of degrowth’s own objectives in that productive capital and technical knowledge enable more goods to be produced with less input resources in many cases.
Further, it is conceivable for it to occur that a breakthrough in technical knowledge would allow more valuable goods or services to be produced using fewer resources, and result in a situation where both GDP is going up, and resource consumption is going down. There are probably good, real examples of such technologies. The information revolution of the end of the 20th century is probably one of them.
It’s possible that this is more thoughtfully considered in the literature (I’m not terribly well-read on this topic) and I’d be interested in some good references in this direction. If not, I think many of the criticisms of degrowth are probably sound. I think it is unnecessary and undesirable to reduce the quality of life for the majority of people in order to create an economic system compatible with the real limits of ecological resources, and focusing on reducing GDP risks causing that.
If the focus is actually resource consumption, as I think it should be, then I think the rhetoric around GDP, and even the name degrowth, is misleading and unappealing to most people. It seems to me that the operative word ought to be efficiency. Doing more with less. In that view the path forward looks more like investing heavily in R&D, rearchitecting urban infrastructure, and driving down water, energy, and land usage per capita. GDP hardly seems relevant.
This is a good summary of the concept:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-07/degrowth-as-a-concept-and-a-practice-introduction/
So yes the real target is to stay within planetary boundaries and to shut down problematic industries as quickly as possible, to increase the quality of life over the long term. The key with GDP is that degrowth argues that GDP is a flawed metric for quality of life. For example when you work less, you reduce GDP, but have more free time, which might improve your life even more then the extra work income. The problem is that 32 out of 116 countries have actually managed to decouple GDP growth from emissions and those are nearly all developed countries, which have way to high emissions already and the fall in emissions is pretty low. The argument is that we can provide a good quality of life for everybody on the planet, while staying within planetary boundaries, by cutting wastefull practises and using resources in a more targeted way. For example by using bicycles instead of cars, which are more expensive to produce and also use a lot more oil.