The intellectual and ethical dishonesty of the de-growth group is made worse when it can offer no practical, politically feasible path to de-growth that would not at the same time require violent state-led suppression of normal economic life. Stiglitz and Co. ought to consider the COVID era - as perhaps the closest we came to implementing a set of de-growth type policies intended to shut down normal life. A shut down that under such circumstances proved to be politically feasible with minimal violence. Perhaps that’s exactly what these de-growthers are ultimately banking on. A series of catastrophic, external shocks - that would give them an excuse to experiment with de-growth policies. We all ought to be careful what Stiglitz & Co. wish for.
"The EU is the only government that has shown much interest in degrowth." It’s not a government! And this contradicted immediately by the Draghi report. No government in Europe wants degrowth: quite the opposite. The policy debates in the UK, Germany et al are about getting growth. The Greeks among others had degrowth during great financialcrisis, and have turned their economy around. And Poland? Wow. Any government that makes their people poorer won't survive.
It occurs to me that much of the wealth they're talking about appropriating, uh, doesn't exist because you can only get it when you crystallize it. And, uh, if you were to attempt to crystallize all of that wealth simultaneously, its value would go to nothing because, uh, wealth is as much about anticipating the future, i.e., a flow concept, as it is a stock concept in the present. And who is going to pay any attention to it if it's going to be appropriated? It'll disappear. It'll be like a Dutch tulip.
These guys are all economists at some point at somewhere That at some point they must know this is all fantasy. That their numbers don't work, that they're repudiating history, common sense, economic thinking, everything.
We're in one weird trick territory. I guess Katya Hoyer's Behind the Wall GDR seems to be their ideal society.
EU is indeed a government although not a national one (and overlain on the national) - EU mechanisms, regs, etc are meaningful and binding in a sort of Federal way. It's not empty suit like UN.
And while yes Draghi report is there, it's one 'faction' inside of EU circuit (to speak of EU in a broad fuzzy sense and not just the institutions) - as as one can see from critiques from within EU circles like by by ABB's head just days ago (see FT Europe risks ‘mass unemployment’ without reform, warns ABB boss https://www.ft.com/content/c7d9e440-49a9-4254-bc18-748baa99c7d8?syn-25a6b1a6=1) there's great and well-founded concern that Draghi's really well-placed recommendations are being sapped away by the degrowthers (not his words of course) and generally the staid-interests.
There is certainly - in my exposure to EU circles from my RenEng exposure and thus to the various Greenies - a signifcant chunk of degrowth thinking amongst the GReen Parties (in plural) factions both electorally and their sympathisers / travellers within the EU bureaucracy.
And certainly in France there's non-trivial amounts of Piketty type people with his kind of "crush the bosses" thinking.
At same time I think indeed there is change from only 3-5 years ago post Draghi above all but with the
But I don't think the fat UK, Germany etc. are headline talking growth is actually refuting the unfortunately still important push from the Degrowth Greenies in areas like climate / green as well as blocking regulatory reform - for all there are better signs too.
UK alone you have a lip service and then very little to no coherent practical actually to address insofar as one can follow (but then I don't do UK so it's second hand to me).
Millband in the UK is now going after heated towel racks. Perhaps the owners of those things will have to wear a scarlet “T”? Degrowth seems to be a moral crusade. The UK greens want to ban flights under three hours, etc. The UK left does have a strong degrowth faction (though they don’t call it degrowth, necessarily).
Yeah these factions don't openly call Degrowth - and probably half the time they themselves don't recognise it is that, engaging in magical thinking that there's not a trade off.
but yes, I think overall vast swaths of Proggy Lefty Leftism on the part of the developed world college educated professional classes really frequently leaves me with an impressoin of a kind of secularised inverted Victorian prudery - displaced into different directions of course but really deep down having similar psychological triggers, and quasi-religious in feeling.
This is not just a Labour thing though - degrowth is all over the Tory right as well - Rory Stewart and his "don't build anywhere and stop AI now" nonsense for a start.
The opinions of junior staffers in Brussels may have real world effects sometimes, but not when they openly challenge the electoral promises of national governments.
Strasbourg at least has electoral legitimacy, but in Strasbourg the Greens do not rule anymore. Also, the Greens in Strasbourg are occupied with battling radical nationalism of different stripes.
The bureaucratic machine in Brussels will be simply put in its place, when it oversteps.
I don't deal with junior staffers amigo. What I interact with is much further up the food chain. Very much further.
The Brussels bureacracy need not even 'over-step' - status quo intertia as Draghi quite rightly put his finger on is more than half the problem.
This of course leaving aside the immobilism of combo of national govs in interaction with the EU bureaucracy.
This is not to be EU pessimist nor anti-EU, really the contrary but the influence of degrowthers is still there although receding and the ability of that faction to indirectly throw quite a lot of sand in the wheels is not trivial.
But really dangerous stuff like the Lieferkettengesetz and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive has faced such concentrated backlash, that both are effectively defanged now. If you read closely, not only are most companies exempt, even for the large companies that have to go through the motions, there is no enforcement mechanism. It's all theater.
There may be little chance of things getting better, but when things are in danger to get worse, people/national governments actively fight back.
Well yes some of the utterly mad stuff is getting defanged - but status quo is no longer sustainable and this is very much a problem - and I see a problem in yes the way Germans etc are responding, sluggishly, defensively where a good dose of American dynamism in adoption of innovation is needed. Again Draghi is spot on but there is far too much complacency which frnakly I see in your comment here. Again not Europessimism here but... worried Draghi-action is being done at far too typical "Brussels" speed
The great irony of the Global Justice Report style of thinking is that it completely lacks humility. It assumes that the most complex system in the known universe—the human brain acting in concert across diverse cultures—can be governed by a single steering wheel: I'm surprised at the sheer historical illiteracy on show. Variations in the kind of central planning has been tried in many times and places and has always resulted in poverty except for the elite in charge.
Something else: the greatest reduction in poverty ever achieved in proportionate and absolute terms has been China over the past 40 yrs; India is getting there too with an expanding middle class; in Europe we see Ireland Spain Poland among others and there are great but overlooked examples in Africa and south America, and across Asia too.
The Global Justice Report treats global wealth generation over the last 40 years as a failure that needs to be dismantled by an international bureaucracy. But the actual historical record shows the exact opposite: we have lived through the most spectacular, unprecedented collapse in human poverty in the history of our species.
Look at how they frame the funding: a 90% income tax at the top and a 20% annual wealth tax on billionaires. Whether or not you think billionaires should exist, an annual 20% wealth tax would liquidate every private enterprise on Earth within five years, moving all production into the hands of the "Global Justice Fund."
On the footnote: "the anti-Westernism that has always animated far-left movements is an unspoken but important motivating force behind the movement."
Have from my RnEnergy investment seat exactly the same deep sense the radical greens, de-growthers are broadly essentially old-wine in new bottles, basically retreading much of the 70s red factions. (oddly a lot of current econo-political is feeling very mid-late 70s thanks to oil crisis rerun as farce [hehe Marx ref])
Generally I find the phrases "Global South" and "Global North" to be signals of that - stupid phrases and generally i think reviving the old 70s style Tiers Mondisme (old wine, new bottles). One sees is in how the same factions decry EU and national governments talking of moving aid to developing economies to more trade and investment basis.
In re Europe and falling behind: it seems to be Krugman has fallen deep into punditism.
Draghi's critique and propositions if one looks at what EU is facing relative to the fading of the old core industrial base - and laggardism both in modernisation and in realising they need to jump into the electrification economy innovation focus post-haste, runs deep in EU industry (not as ideological as US side but maybe more dangerously social and industrial DNA rigidities: US I tihnk the Trump moment is getting a bit of sour medicine as a potentially useful cure).
Writing in from the UK as a longtime Bostonian and a startup guy. Part of it is cultural. The idea of doing something new or interesting is not socially valued.
Oh you want to start an interesting vertical SaaS company? Sorry mate no capital available, have to feed the triple lock pension machine. Also, why would you want to take that risk? Sell insurance and meet me for a pint at 4 at the local.
Statistics suggest otherwise. The UK has about 75% as many start-ups as the US with a population only 20% as large. And UK start-ups have a c 30% 5 year survival rate compared with a c 20% survival rate for US start-ups.
I’m going to need a source for that because everything I’ve seen says something like “US has 50% of worldwide startup activity vs 5% in UK” or “US has six times more startups than the entire EU combined”
When I as a specialist physician in Sweden with a top 1% salary working 50 hours per week getting $5300 a month net, I already feel europoor (with the exception of centrally controlled rental prices everything here is about the same price or more expensive than the US).
I don’t like arguments where you show no acknowledgment or understanding of what the other side is trying to accomplish. To dismiss academically trained researchers as just using buzzwords instead of pointing to the issue they are trying to address and explaining why the approach they’re taking won’t address that issue, is poor argumentation and unconvincing. Saying they’re trying to make Europeans poor without acknowledging that they’re trying to change the whole conception and centralization of monetary exchange in meeting social needs is unserious and misleading. Argue better!
The point of degrowth is to shift the economic system from requiring constant extraction and production to meeting needs through utilization of what has already been produced. If resource exchange is done within communities more than the market, then monetary exchange isn’t as essential. If you’ve ever heard of “Buy Nothing” groups, they’re an example of this.
My goal was never to “make the case” however, my goal is to point out that no good argument just dismisses the other side. That’s lazy argumentation. A good argument analyze what problem the other side sought to address, and describe how the approach they’re taking does not achieve the intended goal. Better luck next time, I look forward to reading a more informed, detailed and nuanced argument in the future.
What I struggle with in these debates is that “growth” often gets treated as one thing.
Building more homes, trains, and clean energy capacity is growth. So is selling more unhealthy food, capturing more attention on social media, prescribing more medication, and expanding the industries needed to deal with the consequences. GDP happily counts both.
Maybe the real question isn’t “growth or degrowth” but “growth of what?” We seem very good at measuring quantity and much worse at measuring whether what’s growing is actually improving our lives.
I agree some growth is better than other growth, but living in a society where that distinction is made by the individual is always better than living in a society where that distinction is made by the elite.
That’s a fair point. At the same time, I don’t think our choices exist entirely in a vacuum. Product design, advertising, algorithms, and incentives all play a role in shaping behavior. The interesting question for me is how much of what we consider individual choice is influenced by the environment around us.
The population bust will take care of the growth problem. By 2050 there should be an absolute decline in population across the EU also perhaps in real GDP (though hopefully not GDP per capita).
Of course, the idea that a couple billion younger, poorer people in Africa and the Mideast will stay put and quietly watch Europe become a defenseless and depopulated old age home is inconsistent with thousands of years of European history and migrations/conquests.
My guess is those new voters, when they arrive, won’t be big on degrowth. On the other hand, they weren’t raised in capitalist, investment-driven societies with rule of law so they might still get degrowth anyway.
However, the degrowthers have a point: buying stuff and services does increase GDP, but this buying does not necessarily lead to a better life. I’m reminded of this when I go into my garage.
You keep insisting on making false claims. China's healthcare system is fragmented and mainly out of pocket. How is that adopting anything like Europe? Taiwan's system is also more like Canada's, not Europe.
Countries expanding welfare as they become richer is universal and happened to the US too, even when it takes a hit to growth.
Europe has multiple different systems as well. Some out of pocket, if that means insurance driven. Almost nowhere are people reaching into their own wallets for serious surgery or procedures.
My point was that Noah missed a chance to point out in a paragraph that lots of growing wealthy Asian countries adopted many of the good parts of the European welfare state without eschewing growth.
China has 3 different public insurance systems. They did a big revamp of it in 2009. They also have central price negotiation for drugs and regularly achieve 50-60% discounts relative to Europe. (Because companies will take a price hit to access over a billion potential patients)
Taiwan's is national single paper, it is closer to the European ideal of universal healthcare than it is to anything the US is doing.
A whole bunch of the degrowth people is just urbanists who want less cars in inner cities tagging on to a popular notion (popular in certain academic circles that is) to get more citations on their papers. But mostly it's just a continuation of the Club of Rome kind of ecosystems thinking, or from the Ecological Economics school of thought pioneered by Herman Daly (an American) and others. A bit of Kropotkin, some Polanyi, a dot of Marx, combined with some of that French critical theory. Nothing new under the sun. No one will listen to what's being said, not even when, at some point, humanity is running out of fossil fuels, or has tipped some kind of environmental threshold over the edge, leading to calamity. Après nous, le déluge.
Im a reasonably well informed European. The only place I see degrowth duscussed is in Noah's posts. While Draghi and Letta are discussed endlessly ( admittedly as an alternative to implementing then!)
No one is saying we should de-fund the police. No one is saying we should mandate the vaccine. No one is saying we should have open boarders. No one is saying we should have degrowth.
They are, if you change assumption of innocence to assumption of guilt even in the case of small companies, who are entirely unequipped to prove their supply chains are up to standards.
They would have needed to fly around the world to check on local conditions in person, because their suppliers having local certificates would not have been enough to satisfy German law and stave off predatory civil suits.
I wonder if the entire degrowth movement isn't simply just the next attempt to increase social status of intellectuals and reduce the status of their old school friends who collected Bs and Cs, but now are annoyingly rich from starting successful businesses.
Of course it is. The entire leftist ideology is greed, envy, and jealousy. Which isn't inherently bad, but instead of using those feelings as motivation to build their own success, they use those feelings as justification to take what others have built. That is inherently bad.
The intellectual and ethical dishonesty of the de-growth group is made worse when it can offer no practical, politically feasible path to de-growth that would not at the same time require violent state-led suppression of normal economic life. Stiglitz and Co. ought to consider the COVID era - as perhaps the closest we came to implementing a set of de-growth type policies intended to shut down normal life. A shut down that under such circumstances proved to be politically feasible with minimal violence. Perhaps that’s exactly what these de-growthers are ultimately banking on. A series of catastrophic, external shocks - that would give them an excuse to experiment with de-growth policies. We all ought to be careful what Stiglitz & Co. wish for.
Making contingency plans in the event of catastrophic external shocks seems rational and moral to me, not intellectually and ethically dishonest.
"The EU is the only government that has shown much interest in degrowth." It’s not a government! And this contradicted immediately by the Draghi report. No government in Europe wants degrowth: quite the opposite. The policy debates in the UK, Germany et al are about getting growth. The Greeks among others had degrowth during great financialcrisis, and have turned their economy around. And Poland? Wow. Any government that makes their people poorer won't survive.
It occurs to me that much of the wealth they're talking about appropriating, uh, doesn't exist because you can only get it when you crystallize it. And, uh, if you were to attempt to crystallize all of that wealth simultaneously, its value would go to nothing because, uh, wealth is as much about anticipating the future, i.e., a flow concept, as it is a stock concept in the present. And who is going to pay any attention to it if it's going to be appropriated? It'll disappear. It'll be like a Dutch tulip.
These guys are all economists at some point at somewhere That at some point they must know this is all fantasy. That their numbers don't work, that they're repudiating history, common sense, economic thinking, everything.
We're in one weird trick territory. I guess Katya Hoyer's Behind the Wall GDR seems to be their ideal society.
(PS: I don't want my work week cut in two!)
Well...
EU is indeed a government although not a national one (and overlain on the national) - EU mechanisms, regs, etc are meaningful and binding in a sort of Federal way. It's not empty suit like UN.
And while yes Draghi report is there, it's one 'faction' inside of EU circuit (to speak of EU in a broad fuzzy sense and not just the institutions) - as as one can see from critiques from within EU circles like by by ABB's head just days ago (see FT Europe risks ‘mass unemployment’ without reform, warns ABB boss https://www.ft.com/content/c7d9e440-49a9-4254-bc18-748baa99c7d8?syn-25a6b1a6=1) there's great and well-founded concern that Draghi's really well-placed recommendations are being sapped away by the degrowthers (not his words of course) and generally the staid-interests.
There is certainly - in my exposure to EU circles from my RenEng exposure and thus to the various Greenies - a signifcant chunk of degrowth thinking amongst the GReen Parties (in plural) factions both electorally and their sympathisers / travellers within the EU bureaucracy.
And certainly in France there's non-trivial amounts of Piketty type people with his kind of "crush the bosses" thinking.
At same time I think indeed there is change from only 3-5 years ago post Draghi above all but with the
But I don't think the fat UK, Germany etc. are headline talking growth is actually refuting the unfortunately still important push from the Degrowth Greenies in areas like climate / green as well as blocking regulatory reform - for all there are better signs too.
UK alone you have a lip service and then very little to no coherent practical actually to address insofar as one can follow (but then I don't do UK so it's second hand to me).
Millband in the UK is now going after heated towel racks. Perhaps the owners of those things will have to wear a scarlet “T”? Degrowth seems to be a moral crusade. The UK greens want to ban flights under three hours, etc. The UK left does have a strong degrowth faction (though they don’t call it degrowth, necessarily).
Hah... Scarlet T....
Yeah these factions don't openly call Degrowth - and probably half the time they themselves don't recognise it is that, engaging in magical thinking that there's not a trade off.
but yes, I think overall vast swaths of Proggy Lefty Leftism on the part of the developed world college educated professional classes really frequently leaves me with an impressoin of a kind of secularised inverted Victorian prudery - displaced into different directions of course but really deep down having similar psychological triggers, and quasi-religious in feeling.
This is not just a Labour thing though - degrowth is all over the Tory right as well - Rory Stewart and his "don't build anywhere and stop AI now" nonsense for a start.
The opinions of junior staffers in Brussels may have real world effects sometimes, but not when they openly challenge the electoral promises of national governments.
Strasbourg at least has electoral legitimacy, but in Strasbourg the Greens do not rule anymore. Also, the Greens in Strasbourg are occupied with battling radical nationalism of different stripes.
The bureaucratic machine in Brussels will be simply put in its place, when it oversteps.
Junior Staffers? Really, that's your play?
I don't deal with junior staffers amigo. What I interact with is much further up the food chain. Very much further.
The Brussels bureacracy need not even 'over-step' - status quo intertia as Draghi quite rightly put his finger on is more than half the problem.
This of course leaving aside the immobilism of combo of national govs in interaction with the EU bureaucracy.
This is not to be EU pessimist nor anti-EU, really the contrary but the influence of degrowthers is still there although receding and the ability of that faction to indirectly throw quite a lot of sand in the wheels is not trivial.
Yes, inertia is real.
But really dangerous stuff like the Lieferkettengesetz and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive has faced such concentrated backlash, that both are effectively defanged now. If you read closely, not only are most companies exempt, even for the large companies that have to go through the motions, there is no enforcement mechanism. It's all theater.
There may be little chance of things getting better, but when things are in danger to get worse, people/national governments actively fight back.
Well yes some of the utterly mad stuff is getting defanged - but status quo is no longer sustainable and this is very much a problem - and I see a problem in yes the way Germans etc are responding, sluggishly, defensively where a good dose of American dynamism in adoption of innovation is needed. Again Draghi is spot on but there is far too much complacency which frnakly I see in your comment here. Again not Europessimism here but... worried Draghi-action is being done at far too typical "Brussels" speed
Right now you won't sell anything to Europe by describing it as 'American'. The US has undergone a dynamic shift from exemplary to salutary.
Also Stiglitz is American.
The great irony of the Global Justice Report style of thinking is that it completely lacks humility. It assumes that the most complex system in the known universe—the human brain acting in concert across diverse cultures—can be governed by a single steering wheel: I'm surprised at the sheer historical illiteracy on show. Variations in the kind of central planning has been tried in many times and places and has always resulted in poverty except for the elite in charge.
Something else: the greatest reduction in poverty ever achieved in proportionate and absolute terms has been China over the past 40 yrs; India is getting there too with an expanding middle class; in Europe we see Ireland Spain Poland among others and there are great but overlooked examples in Africa and south America, and across Asia too.
The Global Justice Report treats global wealth generation over the last 40 years as a failure that needs to be dismantled by an international bureaucracy. But the actual historical record shows the exact opposite: we have lived through the most spectacular, unprecedented collapse in human poverty in the history of our species.
Look at how they frame the funding: a 90% income tax at the top and a 20% annual wealth tax on billionaires. Whether or not you think billionaires should exist, an annual 20% wealth tax would liquidate every private enterprise on Earth within five years, moving all production into the hands of the "Global Justice Fund."
Well, if poverty is the actual goal, maybe there is a place for central government planning of the economy, since that is the one sure outcome.
Quite agreed.
On the footnote: "the anti-Westernism that has always animated far-left movements is an unspoken but important motivating force behind the movement."
Have from my RnEnergy investment seat exactly the same deep sense the radical greens, de-growthers are broadly essentially old-wine in new bottles, basically retreading much of the 70s red factions. (oddly a lot of current econo-political is feeling very mid-late 70s thanks to oil crisis rerun as farce [hehe Marx ref])
Generally I find the phrases "Global South" and "Global North" to be signals of that - stupid phrases and generally i think reviving the old 70s style Tiers Mondisme (old wine, new bottles). One sees is in how the same factions decry EU and national governments talking of moving aid to developing economies to more trade and investment basis.
In re Europe and falling behind: it seems to be Krugman has fallen deep into punditism.
Draghi's critique and propositions if one looks at what EU is facing relative to the fading of the old core industrial base - and laggardism both in modernisation and in realising they need to jump into the electrification economy innovation focus post-haste, runs deep in EU industry (not as ideological as US side but maybe more dangerously social and industrial DNA rigidities: US I tihnk the Trump moment is getting a bit of sour medicine as a potentially useful cure).
More Draghi application faster is badly needed.
Writing in from the UK as a longtime Bostonian and a startup guy. Part of it is cultural. The idea of doing something new or interesting is not socially valued.
Oh you want to start an interesting vertical SaaS company? Sorry mate no capital available, have to feed the triple lock pension machine. Also, why would you want to take that risk? Sell insurance and meet me for a pint at 4 at the local.
Statistics suggest otherwise. The UK has about 75% as many start-ups as the US with a population only 20% as large. And UK start-ups have a c 30% 5 year survival rate compared with a c 20% survival rate for US start-ups.
I’m going to need a source for that because everything I’ve seen says something like “US has 50% of worldwide startup activity vs 5% in UK” or “US has six times more startups than the entire EU combined”
When I as a specialist physician in Sweden with a top 1% salary working 50 hours per week getting $5300 a month net, I already feel europoor (with the exception of centrally controlled rental prices everything here is about the same price or more expensive than the US).
I don’t like arguments where you show no acknowledgment or understanding of what the other side is trying to accomplish. To dismiss academically trained researchers as just using buzzwords instead of pointing to the issue they are trying to address and explaining why the approach they’re taking won’t address that issue, is poor argumentation and unconvincing. Saying they’re trying to make Europeans poor without acknowledging that they’re trying to change the whole conception and centralization of monetary exchange in meeting social needs is unserious and misleading. Argue better!
You haven’t made their case either. What does
> trying to change the whole conception and centralization of monetary exchange in meeting social needs
mean exactly?
I didn’t write the article.
I didn’t say you did. I quoted you and asked what you meant by your phraseology.
The point of degrowth is to shift the economic system from requiring constant extraction and production to meeting needs through utilization of what has already been produced. If resource exchange is done within communities more than the market, then monetary exchange isn’t as essential. If you’ve ever heard of “Buy Nothing” groups, they’re an example of this.
My goal was never to “make the case” however, my goal is to point out that no good argument just dismisses the other side. That’s lazy argumentation. A good argument analyze what problem the other side sought to address, and describe how the approach they’re taking does not achieve the intended goal. Better luck next time, I look forward to reading a more informed, detailed and nuanced argument in the future.
The article is very clear:
He uses Piketty's own tweet to summarize de-growth: "work less, grow less, consume less, change your diet"
He then explains that de-growthers provide no data or analysis as to how this will improve people's lives, citing the Savin and van den Bergh study.
Finally he provides evidence for the counter-factual of degrowth: when poverty goes down growth went up. When poverty goes up growth went down.
Like the degrowthers, I too, want fewer bad things and more good things. Like the degrowthers, I'm not going to explain myself any more than that.
What I struggle with in these debates is that “growth” often gets treated as one thing.
Building more homes, trains, and clean energy capacity is growth. So is selling more unhealthy food, capturing more attention on social media, prescribing more medication, and expanding the industries needed to deal with the consequences. GDP happily counts both.
Maybe the real question isn’t “growth or degrowth” but “growth of what?” We seem very good at measuring quantity and much worse at measuring whether what’s growing is actually improving our lives.
I agree some growth is better than other growth, but living in a society where that distinction is made by the individual is always better than living in a society where that distinction is made by the elite.
That’s a fair point. At the same time, I don’t think our choices exist entirely in a vacuum. Product design, advertising, algorithms, and incentives all play a role in shaping behavior. The interesting question for me is how much of what we consider individual choice is influenced by the environment around us.
The population bust will take care of the growth problem. By 2050 there should be an absolute decline in population across the EU also perhaps in real GDP (though hopefully not GDP per capita).
Of course, the idea that a couple billion younger, poorer people in Africa and the Mideast will stay put and quietly watch Europe become a defenseless and depopulated old age home is inconsistent with thousands of years of European history and migrations/conquests.
My guess is those new voters, when they arrive, won’t be big on degrowth. On the other hand, they weren’t raised in capitalist, investment-driven societies with rule of law so they might still get degrowth anyway.
The threat of high population growth was the only justification for degrowth. Since that isn’t going to happen there is no argument for
It at all.
However, the degrowthers have a point: buying stuff and services does increase GDP, but this buying does not necessarily lead to a better life. I’m reminded of this when I go into my garage.
I can summarize their ideas quicker: You will eat zee bugs, own nothing and like it!
Europe should grow.
However, this piece was made weaker by not talking about what Asian countries did when they got richer.
Namely, they adopted a lot of the things that Americans and Europeans like about being in Europe.
Taiwan's health system, China's health system, public transport, labor protections, paid parental leave etc.
A paragraph about how growing Asian economies adopted all of these things while still committing to growth would have made this stronger.
You keep insisting on making false claims. China's healthcare system is fragmented and mainly out of pocket. How is that adopting anything like Europe? Taiwan's system is also more like Canada's, not Europe.
Countries expanding welfare as they become richer is universal and happened to the US too, even when it takes a hit to growth.
Europe has multiple different systems as well. Some out of pocket, if that means insurance driven. Almost nowhere are people reaching into their own wallets for serious surgery or procedures.
My point was that Noah missed a chance to point out in a paragraph that lots of growing wealthy Asian countries adopted many of the good parts of the European welfare state without eschewing growth.
China has 3 different public insurance systems. They did a big revamp of it in 2009. They also have central price negotiation for drugs and regularly achieve 50-60% discounts relative to Europe. (Because companies will take a price hit to access over a billion potential patients)
Taiwan's is national single paper, it is closer to the European ideal of universal healthcare than it is to anything the US is doing.
It takes a special kind of crazy to look at the last two decades of European politics and go "Hey, you know what would improve this? Less growth!"
Won’t the current course of European demographics achieve a similar end result?
A whole bunch of the degrowth people is just urbanists who want less cars in inner cities tagging on to a popular notion (popular in certain academic circles that is) to get more citations on their papers. But mostly it's just a continuation of the Club of Rome kind of ecosystems thinking, or from the Ecological Economics school of thought pioneered by Herman Daly (an American) and others. A bit of Kropotkin, some Polanyi, a dot of Marx, combined with some of that French critical theory. Nothing new under the sun. No one will listen to what's being said, not even when, at some point, humanity is running out of fossil fuels, or has tipped some kind of environmental threshold over the edge, leading to calamity. Après nous, le déluge.
Im a reasonably well informed European. The only place I see degrowth duscussed is in Noah's posts. While Draghi and Letta are discussed endlessly ( admittedly as an alternative to implementing then!)
No one is saying we should de-fund the police. No one is saying we should mandate the vaccine. No one is saying we should have open boarders. No one is saying we should have degrowth.
In that case google "Lieferkettengesetz" and open your eyes...
In Germany de-growth very nearly made it into national law.
Environmental standards are not degrowth
They are, if you change assumption of innocence to assumption of guilt even in the case of small companies, who are entirely unequipped to prove their supply chains are up to standards.
They would have needed to fly around the world to check on local conditions in person, because their suppliers having local certificates would not have been enough to satisfy German law and stave off predatory civil suits.
Net zero is degrowth.
Not necessarily. Net zero could be achieved using renewable energy, carbon capture etc.
I wonder if the entire degrowth movement isn't simply just the next attempt to increase social status of intellectuals and reduce the status of their old school friends who collected Bs and Cs, but now are annoyingly rich from starting successful businesses.
Of course it is. The entire leftist ideology is greed, envy, and jealousy. Which isn't inherently bad, but instead of using those feelings as motivation to build their own success, they use those feelings as justification to take what others have built. That is inherently bad.