I've long been deeply concerned with the kind of exploit you mention in academia. To the extent it may happen in some subfields of econ and STEM fields is nothing compared to it's abuse in some softer areas of the humanities.
And it's not something that should be shrugged off lightly. Every professor employed in a non-productive field is using up resources that might be better used elsewhere. Worse, it exacerbates the problems of distrust of expertise since these fields often have the cachet of serious scholarship yet their results can't be trusted.
However, I've long struggled with how to successfully respond. When it's an area that's already embedded itself in the academy the response of: you obviously haven't read some obscure dense German treatise deeply so you don't have standing to critisize is really hard to overcome and it's so very easy to just label critics as Philistines or (if you lean towards the more STEM side of academics) as embodying the kind of arrogant 'everything but physics is dumb' attitude (prob worse if you're actually a physicist).
And at least degrowth is relatively closely connected to empirical claims that can be checked. Many disciplines also armor themselves against anything like that.
Any thoughts on a strategy? How do you kick a field of research that has effectively become an ideology not truth seeking from the academy? Internal criticism isn't enough if you'd have to waste 10 years studying bullshit to even just not be pushed out of the room much less listened to?
I'm really worried about this too, frankly. (For what it's worth, I'm a millennial who in his best life would have been a nerdy professor of economic history but is pivoting to STEM on the West Coast). For different reasons. The thing is, I think you misunderstand the humanities.
History, English, etc. are and can be very rigorous disciplines. My history profs taught me how to think rigorously about my claims and knowledge in ways my more technically oriented professors never did.
In academia, in these fields, there are no longer jobs. Partly because of a decades long campaign against humanities departments and partly because the departments refused to address what getting an English or History degree meant in a changing world (humanities majors still make pretty good money, FWIW). But humanities academia just died, especially after 2008. There aren't jobs. There are no jobs, really. There might be one to three tenure track openings in the US for Ph.D's specializing in US history in a given year.
A lot of the bullshit you see like this is frankly from semi-failed academics who are trying to find a way back into the academy via novelty and clout, and Im not sure what else to do with them.
I didn't say or mean to suggest that all humanities is bullshit or is never rigorous. If it was then there would be a simple solution: just call for cuts to humanities with the standard talking populist talking points about waste and useless academics.
Indeed, my concern is driven by the fact that my wife is a professor of philosophy (and while I do math my grad program was mixed philosophy/math) and I absolutely believe good analytic philosophy and rigorous humanities are really important.
But I also think a discipline's value is as much or more in what it can firmly reject as it is in what it says and despite the fact that Carnap demonstrated the fact that crap like Heidegger's (sp?) Being and Time was bullshit back in the 50s (or earlier) people still treat that stuff as serious academic work. (this is only an eggregious example...in practice I see the same flawed approach used much more in other places)
And yes, probably in this thread, ppl will argue that they read it and felt it gave them insights...maybe even insights they used to publish a hardcore analytic paper...but that proves nothing. Plenty of people get ideas for papers listening to songs or reading trashy vampire fiction or whatever.
And yes, I could be wrong, but the underlying problem isn't that people study some works that I see as confused but that those who do systematically insulate themselves from any means of evaluation. Indeed, I pick Heidegger as an example bc people will openly insist that it's just not even possible to appreciate his insights piecemeal and the only way you can see the value he offers is via this kind of deep immersion in his complete works. And calling bullshit on it gets you accused of being a philistine. In short, we are told that the only people who can judge are those so convinced of the value they'll invest years into it and attempts to ask for any externally testable evidence of utility/truth is denied at each turn.
But if it was just a few scholars of Heidegger then shrug but it infects alot of humanities. Hell, Jordan Peterson is a product of this (he did a few unimpressive studies early in his career but everything after is unevaluable Jungian nonsense).
Didn't mean to suggest the humanities are at all. Far from it. I do think what we are seeing today are, again, economic effects. There are a whole lot of humanities graduates or those from less rigorous econ programs, especially from elite schools, who realistically can never go into elite media but can become substackers or hacks writing for people who want to hear what they're saying. If they don't feel like they're in a discipline that has to firmly reject anything, as you say, they really don't have to know how anything works - they can make word clouds, or iceberg memes as above, with the relevant buzzwords and their audience will eat it up. Humanities disciplines are rigorous, but what grads, especially at elite schools, learn is that in the wrong the consequences for being wrong are a lot lower than for many engineers (i.e. the bridge doesn't collapse). So I suppose I'm agreeing with your point!
Indeed, after a bit of thought, I think this almost always tends to happen in areas where there is some strong disincentive for anyone to stand up and demand you carefully justify each step.
In ideological areas pushing back too hard about little details can make you seem opposed to the mission. When it's about studying great dead authors being too demanding can give the impression you aren't one of the cool kids who understands how deep it is etc..
So maybe the solution is to appoint people to be devil's advocates. Publish every journal article with an invited counterpiece. If people know you are pushing back because it's your job it might help.
I think some humanities disciplines are rigorous in academia but there are certainly parts of some whivh allow bullshit in peer reviewed journals by professors. I'm responding to what I've seen in published peer reviewed journals by employed academics so I don't think that can quite be the explanation. Indeed, the tough job market should make it better as even the tiniest schools can be hugely selective.
I do think it will vary alot from discipline to discipline and subdiscipline. Some kinds of history, for instance, are harder to totally divorce from external verification because the sources are what they are and thus, while theories/interpretations may not always be very directly checkable there is a gravitational pull. And that kind of thing influences the kind of person who enters the discipline.
OTOH, I've read entire pieces in journals (never a straight up history journal) where the article sounds all impressive and deep but when you dig in it turns out every step is accomplished by exploiting the vagueness of definitions used (does the patriarchy mean an explicit cultural belief that women are less authoritative, an unconciouss tendency to treat them as such, or any pattern that can be identified as generally making things harder for women...does it matter if there are other factors that go the other way). And there seem to be whole journals where 90% of the papers seem to rely on carefully avoiding ever defining anything clearly enough to exactly pin it down.
While I think this happens more often in ideologically charged areas I didn't use this as my first example because it's hardly unique to them and it's certainly possible to do rigorous work in these areas. But the ideological nature makes it easier to insulate from external checking (the sense of mission makes ppl reluctant to 'help the enemy' by critisizing anyone who reaches the right result and because accusations of bias are a good defense ..eg since most of mainstream literature was written by white male authors this can be used to demand any critics have invested alot of time in some alternative literature).
Though, for all I know the causation goes the other way (less constraints let you reach preferred ideological results)..
Peter, what you're describing in the third paragraph is postmodernism's long march through the academies. It's a consequence of some overeducated Frenchmen in the mid-20th century postulating that truth is bullshit, never really proving it with a persuasive argument but winning respect from the academies by dint of their charm.
The vagueness of definitions is a reflection of postmodernism's methods and values: language as plaything, fondness for subjectivity, formalism over substantive argument ... but the most profound change in academics has been in power relations, by putting that ball into play.
While I know what you mean and agree that the influence of certain philosophers and related individuals from France was the point at which this rrose to prominence I also know that calling it postmodernism is a mistake.
Problem is that postmodernism has certain specific meanings within academia and refers to a relatively narrow class of things so when you go calling it postmodernism it just creates another excuse for them to reject the criticism.
And I do think it's not the best term for it because it really is about a methodology not any specific theoretical commitments. Many of the people using the methodology won't endorse many of the claims associated with postmodernism as an intellectual movement so it's a confusing way to label it.
Have ChatGPT read through all the bullshit and summarize it so you can easily point out where it goes wrong? And since ChatGPT is the worst and least capable AI you'll ever use, maybe just have a drink and eat some popcorn while you wait for a version that can point out all the contradictions and specific instances of bullshit for you.
"To be rich is evil" said Hugo Chavez in 2009, who we recently learned at that very time was squeezing over a billion dollars from oil companies to be paid to his cousin's bank account in Portugal.
As a Venezuelan, I have seem voters elect populist leaders who promised to squeeze the goose to produce "golden eggs for everybody" but in the end did nothing but strangle the poor creature and then sat down to eat it with their cronies.
Some people just want a justification for their decision to not have kids. It's okay to not want kids and not buy a bunch of stuff, you don't need to invent a crazy environmental philosophy to justify it!
We need a way to talk about sane growth as opposed growth at any cost which our society has been practicing for quite a while (which is the same as Cancer) We can have abundance and ecological safety, but we have to work hard to reverse the destructive direction of most of industrial society and build a world of sustainable abundance.
society doesnt accept growth at any cost. no country in the world has completely open borders, for instance. most cities (in my country at least) severely limit density. these are huge barriers to growth erected because we are collectively unwilling to pay certain costs
Degrowthers are just the conservatives of the left. Both need an out group that must be punished and made to suffer for not meeting the moral standards of the in group.
II think the degrowth mindset is gesturing at something real and important, however clumsily.
I am 100% against degrowth in the sense of "modern human civilization is evil, we should go back to living in caves and scrounging for edible roots and berries." Where degrowth does have a point is that the hedonic treadmill exists and declining marginal utility exists.
I grew up as a child in the People's Republic of Poland in the 80s. We had no dishwasher, microwave, or clothes dryer. When I was nine years old, we got a VCR, which was considered a great luxury. And we weren't much unhappier, on a daily basis, than a typical American family is today. That's the hedonic treadmill - you go from "wow, we have a dishwasher now! Amazing!!!" to "yeah, of course we have a dishwasher, duh, why do you expect me to be happy about it?"
And there's the related concept of declining marginal utility. Back in Poland in those days, LEGOs, like all imported Western goods, were very expensive. Getting a small (200-300 piece, say) LEGO set was a huge deal, reserved for special occasions. You had only a few LEGO sets, if any, and you cherished each and every one of them. Now, my husband and I are upper-middle-class professionals in the US, and when we buy a fancy 1000-piece LEGO set for our son, he barely blinks an eye. He's happy for a little bit, and then it goes on a pile with all his other LEGO sets - I've lost track of how many he has. The marginal utility of a new LEGO set for my son is a tiny fraction of what it was for me back in Poland when I was a child.
So, in a nutshell, that's what the degrowthers are trying to say: we are consuming resources and polluting the environment for tiny gains in human happiness and wellbeing.
Wise growth seems like the better goal but maybe it’s too close to ‘sustainable development’ to be accepted by the set that wants a more radical approach (bold brushstrokes for more meaning-making perhaps).
Re: degrowth, do you have a psychological explanation as to why this is such an appealing idea to so much of the left?
I mean it was rampant in early environmentalism (eg the long opposition to things like dishwashers) and it's only been after a long battle that some success has been had decoupling environmental concern with a dislike for progress (maybe that's why they are not creating their own seperate movement). And since the products of progress are pretty nice it seems like there must be some explanation of why there seems to be such a strong reaction by some in opposition.
I think that might be part of it, but this idea seemed to be pretty strong in US environmentalism even at times where we had a fair bit of growth.
I mean, I think a good case could be made that it was the same kind of leanings that made so many people fans of Ehrlich's population bomb stuff. I bet other people can trace it back further so I don't think it's just a way to spin decline. Maybe that explains why it's become more popular lately but there must be some deeper part of human psychology at play.
Energy transition is all about higher costs, lower productivity for potential long-dated future benefit. We just went through a mini example with the energy disruption of the Ukraine war. At some point we may have a nirvana of cheap renewables and batteries made of air. Until then- suffering and lower disposable incomes- ie, lower growth.
That all may be true but it doesn't explain why there has always been a substantial constituency who aren't reluctantly dragged to the idea that we unfortunately have to give up growth but seem to find that idea positively attractive.
I suspect it's related to the way that while some of us who think global warming is a real concern are sad to have to admit the downsides of fossil fuels. It would have been great if we could keep burning them without causing any issues (eg if it had turned out that we needed to do so to balance some other long term cooling trend). But other people seem positively pleased to find this out. They find it somehow satisfying or appropriate that we can't just keep burning fossil fuels with no harm.
TBF, I guess I'm seeing it as part of a broader kind of opposition to progress or things that make life easier and let us do things more efficiently. You may be correct if you are defining degrowth more narrowly.
Basically communism collapsed when the wall fell. A British politician on the left said they would reappear as environmentalist and voila there they are
Perhaps re: degrowth specifically but this general anti-progress inclination was there before the communism collapsed. Besides, communism may have been anti-market but it wasn't particularly anti-progress or even anti-industrial.
Also before climate change Ehrlich was scaremongering over peak oil. It is the same people and type of people just a different scare story to achieve the same end: control of the populace. When the wall fell the communists realised that they cannot rely on the people they must control them too.
I don't think it's per se control they want. At least in the traditional sense but I agree it's largely the same people who are on the economic left in the west (tho different than the eastern communists who loved the idea of more factories making more stuff cheaper as long as it wasn't capitalism), but I want to understand the psychology here.
Like what is it that makes them see advancement and greater comfort/ease and emotionally feel that we shouldn't get to have a free lunch and that we somehow ought to pay for the 'sin' of making an easier life?
Brilliant article, Noah, but as a European I’m not completely convinced by this claim. My impression is rather that it’s part of a general pattern of intellectual self-flagellation, especially among some members of the (upper) middle class. Concrete prediction (without high confidence): degrowth will become less popular in countries actually experiencing economic decline, relative to those (European) countries experiencing growth.
More like degrowth is seen as a just punishment for past sins. Decoupling would mean there would be no reckoning. The idea that we got to burn it all and just move on and solve the problems is anathema to some environmentalists, it ruins the rhetoric. See also emphasising decolonisation over development. English environmentalism has always positioned itself first and foremost as a moral crusade on behalf of the natural world against the depredations of humans and industry.
Yes, there is certainly something there but even outside of any consideration of our relations with other countries there is something that causes people to feel that increased ease/comfort/efficiency deserves to be a sin that we should have to pay for. Thus the glee some felt at finding out that fossil fuels are causing global warming rather than those of us who find that fact depressing (would have been great if we could keep burning them).
It’s appealing to downwardly mobile professionals. If you got a short story published in the New Yorker once but scrape by as an adjunct professor, if everyone gets 10% poorer your relative status improves because the primary source of your status is not financial. At least that’s the dream.
I doubt it's that you actually expect you'll suceed at increasing your relative standing that way (eg if you know it's not politically popular) but I think there might be something to the idea of making something of a virtue out of your relative poverty (it's not that you aren't as successful as your friends who work at IBs but that you are more principled).
Still, I think there is probably still more there. Maybe going back to a certain intellectual disdain for people who make practical things (or even competition with the scuency parts of academia)
Or maybe it's just as simple as a combination of nostalgia and fear of change plus the fact that it's often easier to identify the people harmed by some change while those who would have suffered w/o it can't be seen suffering.
The philosophical term for this is ressentiment. It translates to resentment in English, but it has a more fully formed concept in philosophy than the English synonyms of envy and embitterment.
From Wikipedia: "... ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. ... The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."
So you have: 1. An external cause of personal misery; 2. Casting that cause as the enemy; 3. Fashioning an identity in ideas and behaviors in oppositional defiance of the cause; 4. Internalizing the oppositional ideas and behaviors, as well as the enemy's, as positive (self-affirming) identities in antagonistic conflict.
The evolutionary sociology view is the most explanatory. Humans evolved strong group coalitional behaviors mainly to effectively outcompete conspecifics for resources. The agricultural era of larger political entities is accompanied by ingroup/outgroup ideologies framing the outgroup as inferior, usually in moralistic terms--- they are heathens, fallen, pagan, primitive, less that human, uncivilized.
Malthus was the first to frame this innate fear of resource scarcity in scientific terms, and it went viral, viscerally and directly to the present moment. The Irish potato famine is super instructive on this. The English wanted the Irish to starve, justified by their view of the Irish as less that fully human. But they immediately latched onto Malthusian rhetoric to justify it (see Sir Charles Trevelyan).
Environmentalist ideology is an unbroken thread of the Malthusian worldview. They take the rhetorical moral high ground but there are always elements of 1) thriving humans as a blight and 2) top-down schemes to choose winners and losers necessary to save the earth.
May 24, 2023·edited May 24, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
> What they all share is a reliance on past trends to forecast future trends — decoupling has never happened, they say, so it won’t happen in the future.
I don't really know anything about Iceland other than spending a few weeks there on holiday but it struck me as an entire country that has decoupled. They completely deforested themselves, they destroyed their cod fisheries (in the 1930s and again more recently). They don't seem to have any actual industry or exports. (Looking at https://oec.world/en/profile/country/isl it says their #2 export is "raw fish fillets", which doesn't really scream "developed country with per capita GDP of $70,000".)
I honestly don't really understand their economy at all but they seem to continue to have economic growth while having abandoned most of their destroy the natural environment stuff.
"So the degrowth people tell us quite frankly up front that this is an activist agenda. It’s not about finding the truth; degrowth people have already found their truth, which is that degrowth is desirable and good. Having decided on their conclusion, they then proceeded to look around for research that supported that conclusion (or at least, that they felt seemed to support it)."
This could describe the vibe of many activist movements. Too much ideology, not enough theorizing.
Ann Widdecombe... A name I have been pleased not to hear for more than a decade. Glad to know Widders is still as insufferable as I remember from my time in the UK. Sounds like she's moved on from scolding gays to scolding cheese sandwich eaters, a broader audience, and probably just as appreciative.
The funny thing is she's so charmless it actually wraps right back around around be charming in a sort of clueless, unintentional way. If the package didn't come with batshit right-wing opinions she'd be in coveted "national treasure" territory.
Based on birthrates, we're going to hit peak global population this century. I'm wondering how many of our "laws of economics" contain hidden assumptions of a rising population.
Does degrowth follow naturally from a declining population? Fewer people, fewer inventions, fewer production needs, etc... Like so many human features, might we see a very long term (millennia+) oscillation between high standards of living & low birthrates vs low standards of living & high birthrates? Essentially all of Western history has been on one side of this curve. What happens when we roll over to the backside?
I don't know -- I just think it's an interesting question, and one I doubt we're going to be able to predict well in advance.. I'm reminded of Asimov's Nightfall short story, in which scientists on a planet with 5 suns all speculate on what "night" would be like and how people would react to it.
I think being frugal is a virtue. Most Americans are driving ever larger cars and living in ever larger houses but it doesn’t really seem to make them any happier and is not good for the environment. Most serious environmentalists I know don’t own cars, have one or no kids, are vegetarians, etc, as I have been most of my life.
This is sort of spitting into the wind given most peoples desire to consume more and more stuff and our economic, political, and media (advertising) paradigm, which is in fact built on economic growth.
Something is going to have to give when the population starts seriously declining. I guess it’s far enough in the future we don’t have to figure it out now. We can look at places like Japan to have some idea.
I know that being an environmentalist is not exactly the same as being a “degrowth” person. As an economic movement, it seems wrongheaded. But they are probably at least half right about the environment. Noah seems to think that we can just merrily use more and more energy without there being any serious environmental damage. I certainly hope that he is right and I am happy to share his posts on solar energy with anyone who will listen. I would prefer to be an optimist. But I am pretty sure he is wrong. One way or another we will stop polluting so much. I hope it’s the easy way and not the hard way.
It’s good to encourage people to consume less. It should he voluntary though, not some economic policy. Unlike most of you it appear, I would hope that it catches on.
While I don't necessarily agree with the hijacking of the term 'decolonisation' by the degrowthers, I'd suggest talking to a few indigenous Australians, Canadians or Americans before assuming that colonialism is something that's been dead and gone for 50 years.
I've long been deeply concerned with the kind of exploit you mention in academia. To the extent it may happen in some subfields of econ and STEM fields is nothing compared to it's abuse in some softer areas of the humanities.
And it's not something that should be shrugged off lightly. Every professor employed in a non-productive field is using up resources that might be better used elsewhere. Worse, it exacerbates the problems of distrust of expertise since these fields often have the cachet of serious scholarship yet their results can't be trusted.
However, I've long struggled with how to successfully respond. When it's an area that's already embedded itself in the academy the response of: you obviously haven't read some obscure dense German treatise deeply so you don't have standing to critisize is really hard to overcome and it's so very easy to just label critics as Philistines or (if you lean towards the more STEM side of academics) as embodying the kind of arrogant 'everything but physics is dumb' attitude (prob worse if you're actually a physicist).
And at least degrowth is relatively closely connected to empirical claims that can be checked. Many disciplines also armor themselves against anything like that.
Any thoughts on a strategy? How do you kick a field of research that has effectively become an ideology not truth seeking from the academy? Internal criticism isn't enough if you'd have to waste 10 years studying bullshit to even just not be pushed out of the room much less listened to?
I'm really worried about this too, frankly. (For what it's worth, I'm a millennial who in his best life would have been a nerdy professor of economic history but is pivoting to STEM on the West Coast). For different reasons. The thing is, I think you misunderstand the humanities.
History, English, etc. are and can be very rigorous disciplines. My history profs taught me how to think rigorously about my claims and knowledge in ways my more technically oriented professors never did.
In academia, in these fields, there are no longer jobs. Partly because of a decades long campaign against humanities departments and partly because the departments refused to address what getting an English or History degree meant in a changing world (humanities majors still make pretty good money, FWIW). But humanities academia just died, especially after 2008. There aren't jobs. There are no jobs, really. There might be one to three tenure track openings in the US for Ph.D's specializing in US history in a given year.
A lot of the bullshit you see like this is frankly from semi-failed academics who are trying to find a way back into the academy via novelty and clout, and Im not sure what else to do with them.
I didn't say or mean to suggest that all humanities is bullshit or is never rigorous. If it was then there would be a simple solution: just call for cuts to humanities with the standard talking populist talking points about waste and useless academics.
Indeed, my concern is driven by the fact that my wife is a professor of philosophy (and while I do math my grad program was mixed philosophy/math) and I absolutely believe good analytic philosophy and rigorous humanities are really important.
But I also think a discipline's value is as much or more in what it can firmly reject as it is in what it says and despite the fact that Carnap demonstrated the fact that crap like Heidegger's (sp?) Being and Time was bullshit back in the 50s (or earlier) people still treat that stuff as serious academic work. (this is only an eggregious example...in practice I see the same flawed approach used much more in other places)
And yes, probably in this thread, ppl will argue that they read it and felt it gave them insights...maybe even insights they used to publish a hardcore analytic paper...but that proves nothing. Plenty of people get ideas for papers listening to songs or reading trashy vampire fiction or whatever.
And yes, I could be wrong, but the underlying problem isn't that people study some works that I see as confused but that those who do systematically insulate themselves from any means of evaluation. Indeed, I pick Heidegger as an example bc people will openly insist that it's just not even possible to appreciate his insights piecemeal and the only way you can see the value he offers is via this kind of deep immersion in his complete works. And calling bullshit on it gets you accused of being a philistine. In short, we are told that the only people who can judge are those so convinced of the value they'll invest years into it and attempts to ask for any externally testable evidence of utility/truth is denied at each turn.
But if it was just a few scholars of Heidegger then shrug but it infects alot of humanities. Hell, Jordan Peterson is a product of this (he did a few unimpressive studies early in his career but everything after is unevaluable Jungian nonsense).
Didn't mean to suggest the humanities are at all. Far from it. I do think what we are seeing today are, again, economic effects. There are a whole lot of humanities graduates or those from less rigorous econ programs, especially from elite schools, who realistically can never go into elite media but can become substackers or hacks writing for people who want to hear what they're saying. If they don't feel like they're in a discipline that has to firmly reject anything, as you say, they really don't have to know how anything works - they can make word clouds, or iceberg memes as above, with the relevant buzzwords and their audience will eat it up. Humanities disciplines are rigorous, but what grads, especially at elite schools, learn is that in the wrong the consequences for being wrong are a lot lower than for many engineers (i.e. the bridge doesn't collapse). So I suppose I'm agreeing with your point!
Indeed, after a bit of thought, I think this almost always tends to happen in areas where there is some strong disincentive for anyone to stand up and demand you carefully justify each step.
In ideological areas pushing back too hard about little details can make you seem opposed to the mission. When it's about studying great dead authors being too demanding can give the impression you aren't one of the cool kids who understands how deep it is etc..
So maybe the solution is to appoint people to be devil's advocates. Publish every journal article with an invited counterpiece. If people know you are pushing back because it's your job it might help.
I think some humanities disciplines are rigorous in academia but there are certainly parts of some whivh allow bullshit in peer reviewed journals by professors. I'm responding to what I've seen in published peer reviewed journals by employed academics so I don't think that can quite be the explanation. Indeed, the tough job market should make it better as even the tiniest schools can be hugely selective.
I do think it will vary alot from discipline to discipline and subdiscipline. Some kinds of history, for instance, are harder to totally divorce from external verification because the sources are what they are and thus, while theories/interpretations may not always be very directly checkable there is a gravitational pull. And that kind of thing influences the kind of person who enters the discipline.
OTOH, I've read entire pieces in journals (never a straight up history journal) where the article sounds all impressive and deep but when you dig in it turns out every step is accomplished by exploiting the vagueness of definitions used (does the patriarchy mean an explicit cultural belief that women are less authoritative, an unconciouss tendency to treat them as such, or any pattern that can be identified as generally making things harder for women...does it matter if there are other factors that go the other way). And there seem to be whole journals where 90% of the papers seem to rely on carefully avoiding ever defining anything clearly enough to exactly pin it down.
While I think this happens more often in ideologically charged areas I didn't use this as my first example because it's hardly unique to them and it's certainly possible to do rigorous work in these areas. But the ideological nature makes it easier to insulate from external checking (the sense of mission makes ppl reluctant to 'help the enemy' by critisizing anyone who reaches the right result and because accusations of bias are a good defense ..eg since most of mainstream literature was written by white male authors this can be used to demand any critics have invested alot of time in some alternative literature).
Though, for all I know the causation goes the other way (less constraints let you reach preferred ideological results)..
Peter, what you're describing in the third paragraph is postmodernism's long march through the academies. It's a consequence of some overeducated Frenchmen in the mid-20th century postulating that truth is bullshit, never really proving it with a persuasive argument but winning respect from the academies by dint of their charm.
The vagueness of definitions is a reflection of postmodernism's methods and values: language as plaything, fondness for subjectivity, formalism over substantive argument ... but the most profound change in academics has been in power relations, by putting that ball into play.
While I know what you mean and agree that the influence of certain philosophers and related individuals from France was the point at which this rrose to prominence I also know that calling it postmodernism is a mistake.
Problem is that postmodernism has certain specific meanings within academia and refers to a relatively narrow class of things so when you go calling it postmodernism it just creates another excuse for them to reject the criticism.
And I do think it's not the best term for it because it really is about a methodology not any specific theoretical commitments. Many of the people using the methodology won't endorse many of the claims associated with postmodernism as an intellectual movement so it's a confusing way to label it.
Have ChatGPT read through all the bullshit and summarize it so you can easily point out where it goes wrong? And since ChatGPT is the worst and least capable AI you'll ever use, maybe just have a drink and eat some popcorn while you wait for a version that can point out all the contradictions and specific instances of bullshit for you.
Any recommended alternatives to Chatgpt?
“There is no conceivable, stable scenario where the great preponderance of individuals, business interests, and governments choose to reduce wealth and productive capacity—to become poorer—voluntarily.” Paul Crider on degrowth: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/degrowth-neither-left-nor-right-but-backward/
Nice.
Define "voluntarily".
"To be rich is evil" said Hugo Chavez in 2009, who we recently learned at that very time was squeezing over a billion dollars from oil companies to be paid to his cousin's bank account in Portugal.
As a Venezuelan, I have seem voters elect populist leaders who promised to squeeze the goose to produce "golden eggs for everybody" but in the end did nothing but strangle the poor creature and then sat down to eat it with their cronies.
Some people just want a justification for their decision to not have kids. It's okay to not want kids and not buy a bunch of stuff, you don't need to invent a crazy environmental philosophy to justify it!
But then where will you get your smug sense of superiority?
To paraphrase Lincoln: "Whenever I hear any one arguing for degrowth and poverty I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
We need a way to talk about sane growth as opposed growth at any cost which our society has been practicing for quite a while (which is the same as Cancer) We can have abundance and ecological safety, but we have to work hard to reverse the destructive direction of most of industrial society and build a world of sustainable abundance.
society doesnt accept growth at any cost. no country in the world has completely open borders, for instance. most cities (in my country at least) severely limit density. these are huge barriers to growth erected because we are collectively unwilling to pay certain costs
It has always been a mystery to me why the degrowth and depopulation types never lead by example.
Degrowthers are just the conservatives of the left. Both need an out group that must be punished and made to suffer for not meeting the moral standards of the in group.
II think the degrowth mindset is gesturing at something real and important, however clumsily.
I am 100% against degrowth in the sense of "modern human civilization is evil, we should go back to living in caves and scrounging for edible roots and berries." Where degrowth does have a point is that the hedonic treadmill exists and declining marginal utility exists.
I grew up as a child in the People's Republic of Poland in the 80s. We had no dishwasher, microwave, or clothes dryer. When I was nine years old, we got a VCR, which was considered a great luxury. And we weren't much unhappier, on a daily basis, than a typical American family is today. That's the hedonic treadmill - you go from "wow, we have a dishwasher now! Amazing!!!" to "yeah, of course we have a dishwasher, duh, why do you expect me to be happy about it?"
And there's the related concept of declining marginal utility. Back in Poland in those days, LEGOs, like all imported Western goods, were very expensive. Getting a small (200-300 piece, say) LEGO set was a huge deal, reserved for special occasions. You had only a few LEGO sets, if any, and you cherished each and every one of them. Now, my husband and I are upper-middle-class professionals in the US, and when we buy a fancy 1000-piece LEGO set for our son, he barely blinks an eye. He's happy for a little bit, and then it goes on a pile with all his other LEGO sets - I've lost track of how many he has. The marginal utility of a new LEGO set for my son is a tiny fraction of what it was for me back in Poland when I was a child.
So, in a nutshell, that's what the degrowthers are trying to say: we are consuming resources and polluting the environment for tiny gains in human happiness and wellbeing.
Wise growth seems like the better goal but maybe it’s too close to ‘sustainable development’ to be accepted by the set that wants a more radical approach (bold brushstrokes for more meaning-making perhaps).
Re: degrowth, do you have a psychological explanation as to why this is such an appealing idea to so much of the left?
I mean it was rampant in early environmentalism (eg the long opposition to things like dishwashers) and it's only been after a long battle that some success has been had decoupling environmental concern with a dislike for progress (maybe that's why they are not creating their own seperate movement). And since the products of progress are pretty nice it seems like there must be some explanation of why there seems to be such a strong reaction by some in opposition.
I think it's a way of spinning decline into a virtue for European countries, and especially for the UK.
I think that might be part of it, but this idea seemed to be pretty strong in US environmentalism even at times where we had a fair bit of growth.
I mean, I think a good case could be made that it was the same kind of leanings that made so many people fans of Ehrlich's population bomb stuff. I bet other people can trace it back further so I don't think it's just a way to spin decline. Maybe that explains why it's become more popular lately but there must be some deeper part of human psychology at play.
TBH I haven't seen the degrowth idea much in U.S. environmentalism.
Energy transition is all about higher costs, lower productivity for potential long-dated future benefit. We just went through a mini example with the energy disruption of the Ukraine war. At some point we may have a nirvana of cheap renewables and batteries made of air. Until then- suffering and lower disposable incomes- ie, lower growth.
That all may be true but it doesn't explain why there has always been a substantial constituency who aren't reluctantly dragged to the idea that we unfortunately have to give up growth but seem to find that idea positively attractive.
I suspect it's related to the way that while some of us who think global warming is a real concern are sad to have to admit the downsides of fossil fuels. It would have been great if we could keep burning them without causing any issues (eg if it had turned out that we needed to do so to balance some other long term cooling trend). But other people seem positively pleased to find this out. They find it somehow satisfying or appropriate that we can't just keep burning fossil fuels with no harm.
Yes- seems to be a control thing. Some want to be the moral police, the shamers, the new puritans (Greta’s speechwriters, for example).
TBF, I guess I'm seeing it as part of a broader kind of opposition to progress or things that make life easier and let us do things more efficiently. You may be correct if you are defining degrowth more narrowly.
It really is much simpler than that.
Basically communism collapsed when the wall fell. A British politician on the left said they would reappear as environmentalist and voila there they are
Perhaps re: degrowth specifically but this general anti-progress inclination was there before the communism collapsed. Besides, communism may have been anti-market but it wasn't particularly anti-progress or even anti-industrial.
Ok but this lot are.
Also before climate change Ehrlich was scaremongering over peak oil. It is the same people and type of people just a different scare story to achieve the same end: control of the populace. When the wall fell the communists realised that they cannot rely on the people they must control them too.
I don't think it's per se control they want. At least in the traditional sense but I agree it's largely the same people who are on the economic left in the west (tho different than the eastern communists who loved the idea of more factories making more stuff cheaper as long as it wasn't capitalism), but I want to understand the psychology here.
Like what is it that makes them see advancement and greater comfort/ease and emotionally feel that we shouldn't get to have a free lunch and that we somehow ought to pay for the 'sin' of making an easier life?
Brilliant article, Noah, but as a European I’m not completely convinced by this claim. My impression is rather that it’s part of a general pattern of intellectual self-flagellation, especially among some members of the (upper) middle class. Concrete prediction (without high confidence): degrowth will become less popular in countries actually experiencing economic decline, relative to those (European) countries experiencing growth.
(I now see Peter Gerdes already wrote what I wanted to say, but more articulately).
More like degrowth is seen as a just punishment for past sins. Decoupling would mean there would be no reckoning. The idea that we got to burn it all and just move on and solve the problems is anathema to some environmentalists, it ruins the rhetoric. See also emphasising decolonisation over development. English environmentalism has always positioned itself first and foremost as a moral crusade on behalf of the natural world against the depredations of humans and industry.
I think the "colonialism" discourse is a tell. They want to see the West suffer for its sins.
Yes, there is certainly something there but even outside of any consideration of our relations with other countries there is something that causes people to feel that increased ease/comfort/efficiency deserves to be a sin that we should have to pay for. Thus the glee some felt at finding out that fossil fuels are causing global warming rather than those of us who find that fact depressing (would have been great if we could keep burning them).
Since restitution for its sins is not something that is likely to happen, it's perhaps understandable they want to see it suffer. Human nature.
It’s appealing to downwardly mobile professionals. If you got a short story published in the New Yorker once but scrape by as an adjunct professor, if everyone gets 10% poorer your relative status improves because the primary source of your status is not financial. At least that’s the dream.
I doubt it's that you actually expect you'll suceed at increasing your relative standing that way (eg if you know it's not politically popular) but I think there might be something to the idea of making something of a virtue out of your relative poverty (it's not that you aren't as successful as your friends who work at IBs but that you are more principled).
Still, I think there is probably still more there. Maybe going back to a certain intellectual disdain for people who make practical things (or even competition with the scuency parts of academia)
Or maybe it's just as simple as a combination of nostalgia and fear of change plus the fact that it's often easier to identify the people harmed by some change while those who would have suffered w/o it can't be seen suffering.
The philosophical term for this is ressentiment. It translates to resentment in English, but it has a more fully formed concept in philosophy than the English synonyms of envy and embitterment.
From Wikipedia: "... ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. ... The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."
So you have: 1. An external cause of personal misery; 2. Casting that cause as the enemy; 3. Fashioning an identity in ideas and behaviors in oppositional defiance of the cause; 4. Internalizing the oppositional ideas and behaviors, as well as the enemy's, as positive (self-affirming) identities in antagonistic conflict.
The evolutionary sociology view is the most explanatory. Humans evolved strong group coalitional behaviors mainly to effectively outcompete conspecifics for resources. The agricultural era of larger political entities is accompanied by ingroup/outgroup ideologies framing the outgroup as inferior, usually in moralistic terms--- they are heathens, fallen, pagan, primitive, less that human, uncivilized.
Malthus was the first to frame this innate fear of resource scarcity in scientific terms, and it went viral, viscerally and directly to the present moment. The Irish potato famine is super instructive on this. The English wanted the Irish to starve, justified by their view of the Irish as less that fully human. But they immediately latched onto Malthusian rhetoric to justify it (see Sir Charles Trevelyan).
Environmentalist ideology is an unbroken thread of the Malthusian worldview. They take the rhetorical moral high ground but there are always elements of 1) thriving humans as a blight and 2) top-down schemes to choose winners and losers necessary to save the earth.
> What they all share is a reliance on past trends to forecast future trends — decoupling has never happened, they say, so it won’t happen in the future.
I don't really know anything about Iceland other than spending a few weeks there on holiday but it struck me as an entire country that has decoupled. They completely deforested themselves, they destroyed their cod fisheries (in the 1930s and again more recently). They don't seem to have any actual industry or exports. (Looking at https://oec.world/en/profile/country/isl it says their #2 export is "raw fish fillets", which doesn't really scream "developed country with per capita GDP of $70,000".)
I honestly don't really understand their economy at all but they seem to continue to have economic growth while having abandoned most of their destroy the natural environment stuff.
"So the degrowth people tell us quite frankly up front that this is an activist agenda. It’s not about finding the truth; degrowth people have already found their truth, which is that degrowth is desirable and good. Having decided on their conclusion, they then proceeded to look around for research that supported that conclusion (or at least, that they felt seemed to support it)."
This could describe the vibe of many activist movements. Too much ideology, not enough theorizing.
Ann Widdecombe... A name I have been pleased not to hear for more than a decade. Glad to know Widders is still as insufferable as I remember from my time in the UK. Sounds like she's moved on from scolding gays to scolding cheese sandwich eaters, a broader audience, and probably just as appreciative.
The funny thing is she's so charmless it actually wraps right back around around be charming in a sort of clueless, unintentional way. If the package didn't come with batshit right-wing opinions she'd be in coveted "national treasure" territory.
The American counterpart was some finance bro who scolded millennials for being poor because they ate too much avocado toast.
Based on birthrates, we're going to hit peak global population this century. I'm wondering how many of our "laws of economics" contain hidden assumptions of a rising population.
Does degrowth follow naturally from a declining population? Fewer people, fewer inventions, fewer production needs, etc... Like so many human features, might we see a very long term (millennia+) oscillation between high standards of living & low birthrates vs low standards of living & high birthrates? Essentially all of Western history has been on one side of this curve. What happens when we roll over to the backside?
I don't know -- I just think it's an interesting question, and one I doubt we're going to be able to predict well in advance.. I'm reminded of Asimov's Nightfall short story, in which scientists on a planet with 5 suns all speculate on what "night" would be like and how people would react to it.
Branko is right. Good piece, thanks.
I think being frugal is a virtue. Most Americans are driving ever larger cars and living in ever larger houses but it doesn’t really seem to make them any happier and is not good for the environment. Most serious environmentalists I know don’t own cars, have one or no kids, are vegetarians, etc, as I have been most of my life.
This is sort of spitting into the wind given most peoples desire to consume more and more stuff and our economic, political, and media (advertising) paradigm, which is in fact built on economic growth.
Something is going to have to give when the population starts seriously declining. I guess it’s far enough in the future we don’t have to figure it out now. We can look at places like Japan to have some idea.
I know that being an environmentalist is not exactly the same as being a “degrowth” person. As an economic movement, it seems wrongheaded. But they are probably at least half right about the environment. Noah seems to think that we can just merrily use more and more energy without there being any serious environmental damage. I certainly hope that he is right and I am happy to share his posts on solar energy with anyone who will listen. I would prefer to be an optimist. But I am pretty sure he is wrong. One way or another we will stop polluting so much. I hope it’s the easy way and not the hard way.
It’s good to encourage people to consume less. It should he voluntary though, not some economic policy. Unlike most of you it appear, I would hope that it catches on.
While I don't necessarily agree with the hijacking of the term 'decolonisation' by the degrowthers, I'd suggest talking to a few indigenous Australians, Canadians or Americans before assuming that colonialism is something that's been dead and gone for 50 years.