Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler
If you listen to financial news on the radio, you'll hear a daily report on economic growth, with dire predictions if it has slowed, and cheerful tones if growth appears to be rising.
Yet we know that endless economic growth is incompatible with life on a finite planet.
Jason Hickel's article on the promise and potential of degrowth is academic, and not easy reading, but important.
Here's a snippet:
"The core feature of degrowth economics is that it requires a progressive distribution of existing income. This inverts the usual political logic of growth. In their pursuit of improvements in human welfare, economists and policymakers often regard growth as a substitute for equality: it is politically easier to grow total income and expect that enough will trickle down to improve the lives of ordinary people than it is to distribute existing income more fairly, as this requires an attack on the interests of the dominant class. But if growth is a substitute for equality, then by the same logic equality can be a substitute for growth (Dietzand O’Neill, 2013)."
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https://mronline.org/2019/08/30/degr...SQF1ovFN7-8-kE
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O'Neill sounds like he doesn't understand life at all. Inequality (of wealth) doesn't come about by a dominant class, it comes about mostly by hierarchies of competence and risk taking. Absolutely every single thing you see in nature is characterized by inequality. The large trees get larger, planets accumulate unequal amounts of mass, energy from the sun gets distributed more along the equator and less at the poles, etc...
Degrowth would be a feature of redistributing wealth gained by the most competent and giving it, without merit, to the less competent. Of course that would be political suicide. There is a very small minority of people that truly understand that full socialism and massive economic loss go hand in hand. Perhaps a few people that advocate for Bernie understand this, but most everyone else is like that O'Neill character; not understanding the most fundamental basics of the universe, of hierarchies, and of wealth.
I agree that economic growth is unsustainable, and I agree that throwing a wrench in the machine by distributing wealth regardless of merit would be very effective. My position is that we should slow growth via voluntarily stabilizing population, not by throwing out meritocracy altogether.