We have gotten to the point where the simple (and arguably essential) task of individuals learning about what the economy is producing is degenerating into a societal gangrene. No, this is not all the handywork of Zuck and the "don't be evil" company. All the conditions for their "success" have been engineered in the previous decades of the adoption and scaling of TV tech: The captive population of couch potato, oversized "consumers", the behind the scene rat races of "brands", the ever so inventive and smart adtech people (you always need talented and willing accomplishers to dehumanize a situation).
It goes deeper: why is forced consumption such an existential need that must be serviced at all costs? Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore...
One can only hope that digital information systems will at some point switch from being part of the problem to being part of the solution...
That makes no sense. Every time an economic activity happens that helps people growth happens.
The simple fact that when someone gets a bicycle, car, washing machine, electricity, plumbing, a phone, or whatever they value and if it helps them take better care of their family (or even themselves), that counts as growth.
The problem is unsustainable growth, ecological destruction, etc. Of course effective measures (carbon tax, emissions regulations, consumer protection/advocacy, right to repair, open patents) are needed to ward off mindless "VC funded" enterprising/consumerism/gadgetism and waste.
"When a measure becomes a goal, it seizes to be a good measure."
But as you say, the problem isn't economic growth in itself, but the fact that our entire (debt-based) economy is predicated on eternal growth. Eventually, every population reaches a steady-state equilibrium with its environment (even an artificial environment such as "the economy"). The hyper-focus on economic growth and our dependence on it causes all kinds of sustainability problems, whether it's ecosystem diversity, climate change, or any similar long-term problems.
As long as we don't have a sustainable economic system, the other problems can't be solved.
Again, this is not what economic growth is. Any efficiency improvement, any self-improvement, anything, is economic growth.
If you don't have economic growth, then tomorrow cannot be better then today. But that is a very different question to "should we cut down more rainforest?"
You've got the cause and effect backwards, and it's exactly what lobbyists for the problem areas want: arguing against economic growth is pretty trivially a bad idea, but they want you speaking in the abstract because it does useful things like not have you saying "the burning of fossil fuels is unsustainable" and "we need to tarrif unsustainably sourced palm oil" because then you're dangerously (to them) close to actually lobbying for an effective solution.
The problem with this whole thread is that economic growth can come from multiple sources. Increases in efficiency are a very positive source of sustainable economic growth with major environmental benefits. Slash and burn farming or strip-mining is temporary economic growth that will leave the future impoverished.
That's why everybody here is talking past each other.
> Well, the people who are still alive are better off.
No, that's not how it works... these "great reset" theories are nice, and might even make some intuitive sense, but the actual years of the plague were (almost) completely lost (especially economically), sure the recovery seems great on a graph, but the graph would have been (in most of the cases) even higher by then. (Yes, indeed the next generation enjoyed better relations with feudal lords, because labor was scarce. But usually - when people are asked whether they would enjoy a bit better wages or keep their relatives and extended family alive, they somehow opt for the altruistic option.)
The fast recovery soon regresses to the mean rate of growth (as dictated by the general technological progress).
The growth was the recovery of the population. the shrinking is not the growth phase, that's the recession. initially there were not enough people to work, to produce, to care for animals, to plant seeds, to harvest, to clean the ditches, to fix roofs, etc.. waste was enormous, crops spoiled, there was no demand and no supply, markets collapsed.
Then a recovering (growing) population meant that the previous level of economic activity was reached.
This is why some misguided people think that war is good, and it's "necessary", and that "we are overdue". But that's a complete fallacy. Those years have been lost. Yes growth was drastic, but that's hardly any consolation. Just like with COVID19. Yes, mRNA and other new vaccine vectors and tech grown a lot, but the whole economy went to shit otherwise. (Even if the recovery was again fast and even somewhat unexpected, because this time states stepped in and provided okay-ish fiscal and great monetary interventions.)
But people wouldn't be cutting down the rainforest if they weren't rewarded for it. If we patch each problem as it comes along, we're spending a lot of political will on the problem.
The human race, consisting of 6+ billion people, can do more then one thing at a time.
The idea of "we need to end economic growth" implies an extremely broad ranging, aggressive, authoritarian imposition on people's freedoms - requiring so much logistics, infrastructure and coordination as to be practically impossible.
Or you know, we could just fund the EPA and BLM, and employ auditors for sustainable sourcing requirements for overseas importers...
If economic growth is something so natural that it needs to be actively suppressed for it not to happen, why do we need aggressive, harmful growth drivers like planned obsolescence or the ever-growing pervasiveness of ads that this thread was originally about?
That's the whole point! We don't! We have to actively fight planned obsolescence and other useless ways of inefficient growth. But due to the short term optimization of states, society, people, and businesses, it's what happens nowadays.
It's a meta-optimization problem. Like the problem of figuring out how to spend our "remaining" carbon budget best to minimize suffering both short and long term.
There's no real hyper focus on growth. There are plenty of important/powerful/influential people who loudly and clearly say that it's just an artificial measure, we must look at the real problems. Health, education, poverty, etc.
Growth mostly comes into contemporary discourse when people talk about investment or when people use it as a swearword.
There's no real dependence on it. Yes central banks target 2% inflation (US Fed uses the PCE deflator), because it is comparatively the easiest/simplest. Targeting "full employment" is just as important. If there would be nothing to improve, build, no one would have any unmet need, nor anyone would trade anything, then sure, we would not see growth nor debt, but for the foreseeable future growth is a useful indicator for how much debt is okay.
Then how do you have all that money? And where are you keeping it?
(1) Earning that money is still growing the economy, and (2) even a zero-interest bank account is growing the economy (you're just not seeing any remuneration for your part in that) - and (3) even if you took the money home and destroyed it, since you're still working, you're providing a very useful deflationary function since it means someone else can print more money safely (and once again you're helping grow the economy, just yielding your output to a third party).
Eventually you work less so you never earn that money in the first place. This may involve saving up first so you have more economic bargaining power, or it may involve collective action to reduce working hours across the board.
My only point in referencing saving is that it is one path to achieve the bargaining power to actually work less, against employers who inherently want to occupy your entire life. I'm talking about having saved up enough to be comfortable working less - after which you can turn your reduced spending into reduced working. An alternative avenue that doesn't involve saving at all is collective action, which is how we've gotten down to a 40 hours per week standard.
"The economy" is defined by what is legible in the financial system. In this example, that is working for a wage. Time spent on other endeavors is not reflected in such accounting (sure, money spent on those activities is obviously still part of the economy, but said money is only part of what is spent on them). Time spent on other endeavors is therefore not "growing the economy", except in some pathological sense of trying to shoehorn our entire existence into economic terms.
Time spent with family or on hobbies certainly does make society better though, despite not being economic activity or "growth". In fact, this is exactly what opponents of the growth-worship philosophy are aiming for.
It's identical to if you destroyed it. It just adds some risk that you might suddenly mobilize it (hence one of the reasons it's actually illegal for individuals to store large amounts of physical cash for long durations).
Also irrelevant anyway from point 1: you're still working to make money, thus you're growing the economy.
The company doesn't get money (didn't sell the bottles) -> pay less salary for some employee (that didn't operated the machine for that bottle) -> that didn't spent that money because he got a cheaper water
its the defining issue of our times and there is some of nuance: First, there is room (imho) for conventional growth in many parts of the world. Its insane that people go starving, without shelter or water while others throw away truckloads of food - because of "xyz". Then there is the branch of "personal growth" that is decoupled from material consumption. Getting every functioning brain to fully develop its faculties through education quickly translates into economic growth. I suspect that if we address these two opportunities the "materialist growth imperative" will cease being relevant
its all linked. you can't just gift stuff without destroying much of economic organization and ownership concepts etc. you can't get local production going without owning the problem of corrupt local elites (which most likely you educated in your own image) etc...
You're right, it's a complex web of incentives, power (im)balances, sociopolitical inertia, legalisms, etc
Nonetheless the fact remains that we have consistently produced more than enough food for everybody for half a century and so far have refused or failed to distribute it equitably
This is an observation, not a value judgment, I don't have an answer to the question "could it be any other way"
I totally agree. Economic growth in the developed world need not be more than population growth plus a little bit extra for genuine quality of life improvements
The fact that there's starving folks and throwaway-food, and more empty apartments than homeless persons, is an argument against growth... at least on a global level. In a system based on private property, where a piece of paper determines ownership and speculation determines production (instead of actual needs), production is necessarily harmful.
Anti-productivism is not about not producing anything at all, but rather admitting we can take other angles to the problem before extracting as many resources as we can and polluting as many water streams as we can just to produce more bullshit that's gonna end up in the trash soon.
That there's people starving is arguably not a bug of the capitalist system, but rather a feature. If you desire another outcome, expropriate the owners, dismantle the police and organize into autonomous communes.
Humans once operated like this. We were violent, suspicious of one another and traded from time to time. Most people died violent deaths or starved. (Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune on the promise of improving its wellbeing by taking your’s stuff.)
Also, I can’t autonomously grow good avocados in New York.
What's your source? Some people argue the exact opposite. Personally, i don't believe in human nature but i believe in the power of cultures to shape our lives, so the two situations are entirely possible in my view.
> Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune
That's not how it works. It's precisely when there is already power and privilege that a police force is established, to protect those, not the people. When there is less authority/privilege in a community, there is no police force: the people arm and defend themselves directly (popular self-defense).
> I can’t autonomously grow good avocados in New York
Is it a bad thing? I'm not entirely against some goods crossing some distances for some reasons, but of course you couldn't eat avocados in NY everyday.
What good does eating avocados bring to yourself and your community, compared to the social/environmental damages caused by huge monoculture of avocado and transport of it over long distances using fossil fuels?
> What's your source? Some people argue the exact opposite
As you say, it’s controversial. The data I’ve seen popularly summarised and responded to [1] agree that rates of violent death stayed stable or decreased from when we abandoned nomadism until the present.
> When there is less authority/privilege in a community, there is no police force: the people arm and defend themselves directly (popular self-defense)
Authority doesn’t require a font of honor. It just benefits from one. Power exists in a vacuum, and can mobilise people with the promise of a better life. For example, if my commune made dumb decisions and ruined its crops while the neighbours didn’t. (Or for taco night.)
> What good does eating avocados bring to yourself and your community, compared to the social/environmental damages caused by huge monoculture of avocado and transport of it over long distances using fossil fuels?
It brings me pleasure. It also brings me pleasure to know I’m not trashing the planet, but sometimes those desires intersect. Separately, if if my cultural awareness is small and local, I may care less about my long-term effects on faraway places.
What does it mean that you don’t believe in human nature? Surely there has to be some baseline that’s based in genes and hormones and so on (that we’re not yet sophisticated enough to precisely define, of course). Obviously nurture plays a huge role as well.
Or do you believe that if you were raised like a tiger in the wild, you would think and behave exactly like a wild tiger?
The apartment and food issue is actually a consequence of rigid logistics. Stuff doesn't just magically move. Yes. Food is thrown away. Why? People aren't buying it. Why? Not enough buying power/willingness to do so/capability. People are not naturally static. They have urges. They have tastes/desires etc. Industry is however, static.
The Apartment issue is perverse incentives (housing as "investment vehicle", and not everybody wanting to live where the Market assumes they want to).
The funny thing is, from the advertiser's point of view, they think they are solving both these problems by reaching out to that poor uninformed consumer to pull their attention to what it is they need. It completely discounts the tendency for natural damping of aggressively constant stimuli as an adaptive response. It also discounts the enormity and disturbing nature of the infrastructure implemented to further that pursuit.
The issue might be that growth used to be a pretty good proxy for wellbeing, but once the measure was established it became the target. Some dude's law, escapes my mind.
> it provides more positive aspects than negative ones.
I mean, the negative aspects are pretty significant with the whole climate change and mass extinction going on. To make up for that we get cat videos and iPhones?
It's not a zero sum game. We can live perfectly comfortable moved without a lot of the stuff have, or doing things slightly differently. Some things we as consumers wouldn't even really notice, like better insulation standards.
You're right and that's why I specifically said it's a net gain and not that there were no negative aspects to it. Constant economic growth pushes innovation, yes there are downsides just as there are with anything.
One of the problems is ecological destruction which has increased with economic growth. I would argue that because growth is so unevenly captured by those at the top, a very high gini coefficient is another problem.
You mean how clean things were in the industrial revolution? And how eglatarian it was under feudalism? Or back when slash and burn was the only agriculture? Back when we were causing mass extinctions with pointy sticks and still having a population in danger of extinction?
The halcyon past never existed. If we want things to get better we need to move more complex not simplified for the sake of aesthetics and sparing ourselves from having to use our thinkmeats.
All of the things you list are other great examples of problems caused by economic growth. That’s my point, to suggest growth comes “for free” or that there are no externalities, is to ignore all of human history.
We've reversed a lot of that destruction in the past century.
You're benefiting daily from that growth and your modern lifestyle (in 1st world countries) is far above what people enjoyed even half a century ago.
Unfortunately destruction is a necessary evil. There's no way to improve society while simultaneously avoiding any ecological change. Unless you're suggesting we all go back to some sort of nomadic lifestyle?
Not absolutely, but it can be a hell of a lot better than it is. We don't, for example need to have such a lot of disposable packaging, we don't need to farm the way we do etc
>We don't, for example need to have such a lot of disposable packaging, we don't need to farm the way we do etc
Ok, innovate a way to ship items across the world while keeping them from spoiling, getting damaged and make it so they're received in a timely manner. I'd also like to see how you can feed an entire planet with 1st world standards and not farm the way we do.
Just a hunch but my guess is you'll be no where near as efficient or viable as you think you would. I'm gonna place my trust in experts and not arm-chair internet activists.
The only reason you're even able to sit around and consider things like this IS because we've innovated to the point that your base needs are met without you having to lift a finger.
So, yes we should always strive to be better but you also need to take a few moments and realize the sort of advancements it took to put you in a position to consider issues like packaging/factory farming instead of where you're going to get your next meal or drink of water.
>The only reason you're even able to sit around and consider things like this IS because we've innovated to the point that your base needs are met without you having to lift a finger.
I'm at work right now, as I am for at least 24% of the hours of my life.
> We've reversed a lot of that destruction in the past century.
Not even close, where are you getting that from?
> Unless you're suggesting we all go back to some sort of nomadic lifestyle?
US car culture is the first thing I’d put on the chopping block. The US military and billionaires as a class are the two highest polluting entities on the planet. Lots of additional gains to be had there.
I would classify very little of our wonton destruction of the environment as “necessary evil”.
> You're benefiting daily from that growth and your modern lifestyle (in 1st world countries) is far above what people enjoyed even half a century ago.
I wonder if all the men who have lowered sperm counts agree with you…
Seriously? I'm not gonna do your work for you but look up reforestation efforts, ozone hole closing, re-population of once devastated animals, pollution etc. I mean you'd have to be completely ignorant or purposely seeking a specific agenda to miss this stuff. Are you suggesting nothing has improved in the last 50 years and we're on a continuous decline?
>US car culture is the first thing I’d put on the chopping block. The US military and billionaires as a class are the two highest polluting entities on the planet. Lots of additional gains to be had there.
What? This such a lame political response devoid of any better alternatives. Show us numbers and propose an alternative that's better.
Please show us the sources that billionaires and the US military are the highest polluting entities on the planet. That's obvious bs propaganda.
>I wonder if all the men who have lowered sperm counts agree with you…
Your measure for whether we're doing better than the past is sperm count? Huh?
You seem to be suffering from something recently coined progressophobia. I get there are problems but this strange denialism and refusal to admit we've progressed at all is not only wrong, it's harmful to society as a whole.
> If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.
You said largest so you were wrong. Try again.
The second link is absolutely laughable. Gee large industries create more carbon footprint! No shit, that has nothing to do specifically with billionaires. Try getting your news from somewhere else other than GQ.
GQ and QZ aren't legitimate scientific sources bud.
Why would you say that? It sounds like classical ecologist rhetoric. Stop producing shit, stop trying to measure what cannot be measure. Just make sure everyone is housed and fed and suddenly things are better. Sounds like a better and more serious political program to me than any other political party i've heard lately. But hey i'm an anarchist so "fuck capitalism" has always been my program, it's just not what we hear from political parties usually ;)
See anti-productivism, anti-extractivism, anti-capitalism... Or as some writer once said, approximately, "Progress is the myth that says full ahead is always the right direction, ecology is the discipline that teaches us it's a complete disaster"
> Just make sure everyone is housed and fed and suddenly things are better.
Literally 99.8% of the population is housed and fed.
But saying economic growth (however you define it) is the problem, means that economic shrinkage is a solution. I'm not so sure about that. I'm also 100% convinced the problem isn't economic growth, but pollution and other ways of exploiting nature that form part of the problem. But saying that lacks that edge.
>> stop trying to measure what cannot be measure
> That'll work out just fine, I'm sure.
?
> Literally 99.8% of the population is housed and fed.
You obviously live in a bubble. In USA or France, there's millions of people living below the poverty line despite residing in the richest nations on Earth (that are so rich because they are pillaging every other nation there is through neocolonial schemes).
There's countless homeless folks and even more mishoused folks and persons forced to live in bad conditions despite there being millions of empty apartments...
> economic shrinkage is a solution
Economic shrinkage is the only solution is you want the next generation to have drinkable water. All scientists agree we can't go on like that, it's not exactly rocket science.
> the problem isn't economic growth, but pollution and other ways of exploiting nature
Partij voor de Dieren is a Dutch party. That's the 'bubble' I live in.
> There's countless homeless folks
In France, there are 140,000 homeless people. Also 0.2% of the population.
> extractivism
Your condescension is very visible behind your neologisms.
> Hence the degrowth movement
Saying "consumerism" is bad for the environment is rather a different statement from "economic growth is the problem".
> > stop trying to measure what cannot be measure > That'll work out just fine, I'm sure.
> ?
Well, for starters, you can't measure happiness, well-being of humans, animals or plants, air quality, etc. And when there are countless homeless folks, you can't even measure that.
IMO, some approximate measure of your goals, with a sensible flexibility and understanding of its biases, is good enough to steer away from the worst consequences of your policy. But go ahead, base your policies on gut feelings. We all know where that ends.
Problem is there's a finer line between persuasion and coercion than people appreciate. Use guys with guns to sell white powder and you're a bad guy. Place chocolate at kid height at checkout and you're a business guru.
It appears to me that the line is quite thick if you want to draw it between guys with guns and chocolate on a shelf. One of those situations is pretty transparently more coercive than the other.
However, with reference to say the East India Companies, history has established that bands of guys with guns is also a path to being hailed as a business guru.
Such ethical standards can only be altered on a big scale through relentless struggles. Abolish competition and advertisement, and suddenly a lot of things will start to be ok in society. Yes a lot of people will loose their useless job, but that won't be a requirement to have a place to live anymore, and both individuals and society will be better off.
Competition doesn't mean "having ideas" or going separate ways. "Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared" (wikipedia).
For example, competition is when you keep millions of empty apartments to make sure everybody struggles and will pay more and do whatever you say to find a place to live. Competition is also when you teach children in schools that they should not copy because it's cheating.
Advertisement is also not "telling anybody". It's paying other people to tell in your place about stuff they wouldn't want to talk about otherwise.
What are the limits to this abolition of competition? How could you possibly eliminate all zero sum games? Watching toddlers ‘compete’ makes me believe competition is very human and a natural extension of desire.
1. Create fear of the thing that would otherwise be desired. Associate it with badness. This is a slow but relentless form of operant conditioning, which can be done entirely using words and stories.
2. Create substitute and symbolic objects of desire, in order to redirect effort. The purest of these is money.
That's not how ideas work, except in a capitalist system. New ideas about how to better run the world are not allowed because they compete with private interest of the ruling class. The same is true in pretend-communist States like the USSR, which are just State-capitalist systems, not actual communism (where communism is according to Marx abolition of class, property and privilege... none of which were abolished in Leninist States).
> Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore...
Panem et circenses. Even the old Romans were already masters at keeping a populace from rioting and a society from collapse.
We're just lucky that most developed countries have eradicated executions. But to make up for the lack of public spectacle that a hanging or quartering was, we have taken up mass sports events (soccer, baseball, basketball, cricket) and blatant consumerism instead...
You make this sound like a boring dystopia, but everything you say about our society is also the case for 1955, only more so. They didn't have adblockers or sponsor block. They didn't have audiobooks (probably available from your local library to) or anything but radio when driving. They had significantly fewer choices and had to endure radio with ads playing whatever they were told to play.
Meanwhile the population today is the least bound to the couch it has been in half a century (modulo a pandemic).
And, shocking to some, most people are not an empty shell inside, although they have desires and things they want.
Don't complain about ads the next time you stand in line and whip out Instagram rather than an ebook.
I think it's because if we as a society decided what we all have now is enough, we would have a few good short years until everyone realizes we aren't producing more things and we aren't improving things and we've been left behind economically. In this system, you can't afford to stop and smell the roses because next year, someone else will come and bulldoze the field the roses were planted in.
Without the promise of ever rising profits, the capitalist class will panic and do god knows what. Their need for not just profits, but increasing profits is insatiable. Trying to force products on consumers for manufactured reasons is probably not even the worst crime done in the name of profits.
It goes deeper: why is forced consumption such an existential need that must be serviced at all costs? Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore...
One can only hope that digital information systems will at some point switch from being part of the problem to being part of the solution...