Degrowth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth

by wslh • 14 years ago

40 56 14 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

jacques_chester8• 14 years ago

Nothing stops you from doing this yourself.

Just don't expect the rest of us to appreciate being forced to do it.

thibaut_barrere3• 14 years ago

Your comment made me think: interestingly, "growth" as a key concept is being forced on all of us right now, no matter one appreciates it or not... (either directly or indirectly).

If I forget about the word itself (and being unsure of the cultural connotation associated with it outside France - which I have no idea of), I personally do relate to the following sentence in the wikipedia definition:

===

maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, culture and community

====

jacques_chester8• 14 years ago

> is being forced on all of us right now

By whom?

I don't see men out the front with guns and dogs, demanding that I pop up to the electronics store to get the latest TV.

Or that the Buy Stuff Or Else Act 2012 had just passed through both houses of Parliament and received Royal Assent.

dscrd• 14 years ago

We now theorize that on Easter Island, the societies that presided there destroyed their island's environment to such an extent that they themselves were essentially destroyed.

To prevent that from happening, it would have made no impact if a few individuals would have stopped the harmful actions. They would have had to change the whole culture of consumption, production, even religion. See where I'm going with this?

mseebach7• 14 years ago

> See where I'm going with this?

Yes, you're constructing a "the end justifies the means" argument.

jacques_chester8• 14 years ago

> See where I'm going with this?

Down a slippery slope.

Nobody actually knows what happened on Easter Island. There are as many theories as there are people trying to peddle their concept of how the world will / won't end.

batgaijin• 14 years ago

Do you live in a magical world where the two people vying for executive power in the most powerful country weren't scared of admitting to our failing ability to generate electricity efficiently OR in a green manner?

calpaterson2• 14 years ago

> We now theorize that on Easter Island, the societies that presided there destroyed their island's environment to such an extent that they themselves were essentially destroyed.

Actually, it's a matter of dispute among anthropologists and archaeologists. A notable book came out on the topic last year that contradicts the "ecological collapse" view:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/201...

jdietrich• 14 years ago

Most historians now believe that the population collapse on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) was due to diseases brought in by European sailors and slave raiding by the Peruvians, rather than any ecological collapse.

wavesounds• 14 years ago

I think its interesting how productivity increases have led to increased consumption instead of increased free time. Maybe this is partially because consumption is viewed as nobel in the sense that it's what causes the economy to grow.

Does anyone have any thoughts on a technology tax? If say you're fired because your boss hired a robot to do your job, your boss pays a percentage of his increase in profits as a tax which is redistributed to everyone - much like in Alaska how everyone gets a check for the oil that is pulled from the ground, what if everyone got a check for the technology pulled from our minds? Maybe this would encourage people to value technological growth over consumption growth.

mseebach7• 14 years ago

> If say you're fired because your boss hired a robot to do your job,

You're not seeing the whole picture: Being replaced by a robot is just the final step in an extremely long sequence of productivity enhancements that being with using a shovel instead of your bare hands. Why should the tax hit robots but not a power drill? Or a fork-lift truck? A washing machine? Or a computer? (don't forget, as programmers, we are parties to one of the largest eradications of jobs in the history of mankind)

What you're really proposing is a tax on increasing efficiency, by a long shot the best and most easily understood kind of growth. Interestingly, with reference to the movement's goals, little frees up more resources for family, art and music than getting the same work done in half the time.

aes2564• 14 years ago

> What you're really proposing is a tax on increasing efficiency, by a long shot the best and most easily understood kind of growth. Interestingly, with reference to the movement's goals, little frees up more resources for family, art and music than getting the same work done in half the time.

I think the real gripe with this is that, although automated production may be more efficient, it fosters greater wealth inequality.

As tools become more powerful, and come to replace rather than assist humans, those with existing wealth become yet more powerful. The evil factory owner can now produce their widgets five times faster, at half the cost, and they don't have an unruly workforce to rely on.

Zakharov2• 14 years ago

This already exists. If your boss is making more money, he will (theoretically) pay more corporate tax, and that goes to welfare for the unemployed.

thibaut_barrere3• 14 years ago

After jacques_chester comment, I wonder (for everyone): what is you country, and is degrowth seen as something positive or negative in general in your country?

mseebach7• 14 years ago

In Denmark and the UK, the narrative is appealing, not because of its merits but because it provides an alternative to austerity. It seems to be mostly utilized by the same hard-left that has always been more concerned with distributing wealth than creating it. In both countries, the main-stream left has long since realized that there is no alternative to reducing the deficit and bringing back growth.

aes2564• 14 years ago

> In both countries, the main-stream left has long since realized that there is no alternative to reducing the deficit and bringing back growth.

Although behind the scenes this may be the case, the rhetoric remains.

In the UK we still have Labour bleating about the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition making spending cuts "too hard, too fast" when they are barely making a dent in the annual deficit.

31reasons• 14 years ago

I find this fascinating as I am thinking more about how companies acting as Tumors. Growth for the sake of growth is the symptom of cancer. Larger economies do enable human collaborative feats like going to the moon and finding ways to live healthy and longer lives but it's engine itself driven by the fuel (mass consumption) of greed and desire rather than curiosity and joy. All signals seems to indicate that it has gone too far. We have to come up with a sustainable way to create large economies.

jacques_chester8• 14 years ago

The difference is that tumours don't have to solve economic calculation problems: companies do. As they reach the limits of that capability they become increasingly inefficient until they are supplanted by smaller, nimbler competitors.

... or propped up by governments. But then the analogy is even more broken.

sgdesign• 14 years ago

Maybe it's not so much growth vs degrowth as short-term vs long-term? A country like China that's pursuing a very aggressive short-term growth policy is obviously endangering some aspects of their future with pollution, corruption, etc.

I don't have a problem with pursuing growth, so much as focusing on the next few years (or the next election) to the exclusion of anything else.

jacques_chester8• 14 years ago

Is long term growth qualitatively different from the integral of short term growth over the same period?

smanek• 14 years ago

I think so.

On a several decades/century scale it's worthwhile to funnel at least a few percent of GDP into basic science research[1]. But, in any given quarter/year, it's almost certainly a net loss. The trick being that every few decades, you'll get nuclear power, the transistor, etc[2].

Or, as a 'local' example: non-trivial number theory had basically no benefit for centuries but humanity kept 'investing' resources into it - which a short term optimizer wouldn't. Then, cryptography came along and it suddenly 'paid' for the entire field a dozen times over.

[1]: Research is sort of like early stage VC - but with funds that pay out over 70 years instead of ~7.

[2]: I would love to write about many more examples in much more depth, but will omit for the sake of brevity. I roughly feel like the newtonian mechanics was directly responsible for the industrial revolution, relativistic physics for the nuclear age, quantum mechanics for the computer age (with similar analogues in the biological sciences).

DRMacIver• 14 years ago

No, but you can make decisions now which affect the rate of short term growth later.

Or to continue the calculus analogy, you divide your spending on growth between spending that increases the first derivative and second derivative of value. The former is current short term growth, but the latter may lead to more growth in the long term.

shelf• 14 years ago

China's short-term growth objectives are hard to criticise given that a good ~10% of its population remain below the poverty line. Its economic modernisation has already reduced this figure by several hundred million head. Capitalism feeds.

This 'degrowth' ideology seems to be moreso redirecting growth towards things that are more real, necessary and sustainable. Growth is fairly natural and should be expected in any healthy and free economy - not just in our modern 'advanced' juggernauts.

rizumu• 14 years ago

It is worth repeating the main idea here: "Key to the concept of degrowth is that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring and a decrease in well-being. Rather, 'degrowthists' aim to maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, culture and community."

jacques_chester8• 14 years ago

HNers might find reading about Epicureanism and Stocism to be an enlightening addition to reading about Degrowth.

mseebach7• 14 years ago

It's very rarely relevant to evaluate a movement's goals on it's own, especially when they are so lofty as here. What means are they proposing?

In France, it seems they are happily backing the near-total destruction of their economy. I struggle to see how this will allow them to "devot[e] more time to art, music, family, culture and community".

tomjen3• 14 years ago

That sounds like something people might say about socialism too.

We need only look at the Soviet Union to see how that turned out.

stefantalpalaru• 14 years ago

look harder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

arethuza3• 14 years ago

That really doesn't sound like the Soviet Union at all - which was obsessed with growth through centrally controlled 5 year plans.

One of the many reasons the Soviets failed is that they channeled a huge proportion of their national wealth into their military (fearing as they did an attach from NATO) and away from improving the living standards of their citizens.

marshallp2• 14 years ago

The fastest way to degrowth is creation of brain-computer interfaces that have realistic feel like in the matrix. Degrowthers should join the hacker movement in advancing that technology. The way to most quickly advance that technology is through computer vision technologies that allow the running of biotech experiments at an industrial scale. The key to computer vision is the application of machine learning (neural nets and random forests). The key to that is the creation of classifiers on image datasets on cloud computing infrastructure. Therefore, projects like microsoft kinect and google goggles in addition to vision guided industrial robots are the best degrowther strategies.

arsey• 14 years ago

The fastest way to degrowth is [growth] ??

marshallp2• 14 years ago

Focused growth. Instead of factories churning out designer handbags and pet food, have them churn out biotech experiments for brain-computer interfaces.

jonmrodriguez• 14 years ago

Spot on.

These civilizational sustainability benefits are much of why I'm starting an augmented/virtual reality glasses company ( http://vergencelabs.com ). The other reasons are related to education and to transhumanism.

But I don't think we need any invasive interfaces to achieve fully realistic immersion. Optics will suffice. We still want computer vision to do AR/VR and bio as well, but we don't have to wait for transhumanism to succeed before we can start obsoleting physical goods, monuments, commuting, etc using just wearable displays and haptics.

jonathanleane3• 14 years ago

Serious question:

How does a country that embraces 'degrowth' defend itself militarily from a country that is still working on the high production paradigm?

danieldrehmer• 14 years ago

The same way France has always defended itself.

jonathanleane3• 14 years ago

Not sure if you're being funny?

France has one of the highest rates of productivity per capita [0] and is the 5th highest military spender in the world [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...

arethuza3• 14 years ago

Looking at their long history I would say that the French have been as good as anyone, and better than most, at defending themselves.

Of course, they lost to Nazi Germany, but unlike us Brits they didn't have a Channel to hide behind - after all it mainly took the huge sacrifice of the Soviets to eventually defeat the Nazis.

Zakharov2• 14 years ago

Nukes? The French have a lot of them.

arethuza3• 14 years ago

That was pretty much why Britain was so keen to develop nuclear weapons - they are actually relatively inexpensive compared to the equivalent number of armoured divisions.

jonathanleane3• 14 years ago

Having nukes works well as a deterrent to being nuked, but using them (even defensively) could only ever be as a last resort.

It's not hard to see how a country with nukes defending itself from a country with nukes AND a conventional military could be forced to make a whole lot of concessions.

Zarkonnen• 14 years ago

One of the things this comes down to is whether our measures of wealth are sensible.

A country hot enough to require air conditioning will have an increased GDP, but this GDP is really just for bringing it to the norm of another country that doesn't require aircon. And should we count the extra economic activity generated from creating a new demand where there previously was none? [1]

If we optimise for the wrong thing, we end up with bad outcomes.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-18/convincing-w...

aes2564• 14 years ago

I really dislike GDP as a measure, for this and other reasons.

Ultimately, GDP isn't what matters. We should care about wealth creation, about efficient use of resources (including labor), about happiness and enjoyment.

An inevitable consequence of abandoning GDP as a measure of economic progress (as we will, inevitably do) will be coming to terms with the fact that rampant consumerism and gross inefficiencies do not constitute 'growth'

anovikov• 14 years ago

This is impossible because it will stop the investment loop: investment cannot exist in the economy which is contracting and is supposed to contract indefinitely, because average return on investment will be negative. This is why such conditions will never happen.

As for environmental concerns, huge successes by the Germans seems to prove that transition to renewable energy is possible, even with current or slightly better level of technology. This may take some 30-40 years for most developed countries, and about as much after that for the rest, but we seem to have that time given successes in development of shale gas, coalbed methane, and most recently, shale oil.

Germans are good example because if they are outliers given the conditions they have, they are outliers in negative sense: they don't have much of either renewable or non-renewable resources, they are rich and need to consume a lot of the both, and cannot afford having energy too pricey because their economy is based on industrial exports so they need to stay competitive. If they can do it, everyone can do it. Others mostly don't care so far, soon they will have to.

Degrowth

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