hedonicflux~~ on 21/5/2018 at 02:21
Foreword: After my little meltdown, I'm trying to re-integrate with a few online communities by getting involved in conversations that aren't about me and my misery. So here is my first attempt to do that. I hope it's met with no personal extranieties.
Everyone with a brain, (
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229) notably including 15,000 scientists, understands by now that the growth-dependent economy is one of the principle drivers of
certain doom the crisis facing human civiliation. The idea is that profit needs to continue to be generated in order to continue providing a living for an increasing population. (That's actually more ideal than the reality, as capitalism is about generating capital for the few via the many, not providing everyone with a living. But even in an ideal socialist economy, wealth must be generated to provide for people, leaving us with the problem of economic growth.)
Everyone talks about how the main flaw of this and all previous civilizations is that of the growth economy. But I've never heard anyone suggest what a non-growth economy would actually entail. It's as if no one knows how to prevent us from destroying ourselves. Popular critiques of the growth economy have only arisen recently, and now it's (I think) too late. And even now, no viable alternatives, nor even ideal alternatives in specificity (afaik), have been proposed.
As I understand it, the growth economy isn't an actual economic model at all, but the result of having no model--letting capital run free and unregulated. So it would seem that a non-growth economy must involve strictly enforced regulations of some sort. The most obvious is population control, but would that suffice in itself? Does anyone know more about this than I do?
Renzatic on 21/5/2018 at 03:46
Hell if I can remember where I read it, but I recall an article stating that if the development of the world continues as is, eventually the 3rd world will start mimicking the trends of the 1st, up to and including birth rates, leading to a population plateau around 9-11 billion people.
We might not need to worry about population control. The population will control itself.
Pyrian on 21/5/2018 at 04:27
'Course, if all the undeveloped populations achieve our level of resource consumption, we'll have plenty of other problems. Really, we just need to make sure they have access to birth control methods, that being the primary dividing line, rather than sheer wealth.
I find the original question a bit odd - plenty of contracting economies have existed, for various periods of time. Obviously it's possible. Let me get at some questions that I think are more relevant:
P1: "Can an economy expand while reducing its resource footprint?" I think this is absolutely achievable. Not sure it'll ever happen, mind you, but there's no solid technologic link between economic growth and resource consumption. In fact, there's been a huge amount of growth in resource reduction industries. In the short run this may be our best bet.
P2: "Can a stable developed economy exist long term?" Ehhh… I'm doubtful. Humans are just too chaotic, and even without us, the universe loves to throw curveballs. A great deal of existing technologies are not mature, there are a lot of very rich people with currently unachievable ambitions that they're not likely to give up on, and at least some of them will succeed for a long time. Humanity's most stable economies were impoverished to the point of being unable to develop - and very much at the whim of climate, etc..
P3: "Can an economy contract without enormous pain?" Depressions tend to cause a great deal of real human suffering, despite the fact that by-and-large the depressed economies have more than enough output to sustain themselves. In fact, modern depressions are almost exclusively demand-side shortfalls. The rich lose the most money (largely on account of possessing the most money), but the poor are pressed against the boundaries of sheer subsistence. Is this necessary? No, not really. But the political will to have the government step in with heightened progressive taxes and massive infrastructure projects just doesn't seem to exist anymore.
demagogue on 21/5/2018 at 04:57
It's not really "growth" as people tend to mythologize or demonize it. Economic activity is incredibly inefficient as vast amounts of human energy are spent on all manner of things, only a miniscule fraction of which actually satisfies any human utility. We're talking about increasing the efficiency of effort spent satisfying utility. E.g., adding or improving windows to buildings reduces heating and cooling costs, so is an efficiency. Slightly less amount of human effort satisfies the same amount of utility than before. We could spend the next 500 years adding and improving the efficiency of windows to every building on the planet and the economy would be "growing" that entire time. And that's just one thing. We're talking about countless little inefficiencies. It will take centuries and centuries to cover them all, and even then, human action (think of every exertion of effort of every human) will still be vastly inefficient at satisfying utility, just slightly less vast than it is now. So a non-growth economy is hard to imagine.
It would basically require a sizeable percent of the population or resources to suddenly and inexplicably disappear that would counter the efficiency gains of all those reducing-inefficiency opportunities. E.g., adding or improving windows to every building on the planet won't decrease inefficiency if suddenly 30% of all buildings on the planet inexplicably disappear by a small meteor impact or whatever. There's your non-growth economy over the short time frame following that impact (a few weeks or months as things die off), keeping in mind that the number of inefficiencies will skyrocket from that point, so the number of opportunities to reduce them will skyrocket, so all your short-term non-growth economy did is to plant the seeds for the next millennium of very rapid economic growth. So it's even less possible to imagine as a sustained state, unless we're talking about small meteor impacts every 20 years, or a large one that simply extinguishes all human effort forever.
Starker on 21/5/2018 at 04:59
Quote Posted by Pyrian
'Course, if all the undeveloped populations achieve our level of resource consumption, we'll have plenty of other problems. Really, we just need to make sure they have access to birth control methods, that being the primary dividing line, rather than sheer wealth.
Birth control alone won't suffice. A bit more than that goes into family planning. They also need vaccines and education and less people in poverty.
Tony_Tarantula on 21/5/2018 at 13:22
I'll bite.
The post seems to me like a thinly disguised ask as to if it's really possible to implement Socialism.
But... What is Socialism? It's basically an attempt to eliminate what's called the business cycle by utilizing a command and control economy.
Without getting into too much detail since I'm on mobile the historical answer is "no". Governments and private power players have attempted to do this numerous times and it's failed every time. On a large scale communist regimes still had economic cycles, and attempts to force growth in Russia and China were the largest humanitarian disasters to occur in human history, surpassing even the death count of the Holocaust by a large margin.
A smaller example is a currency peg like the Franc-Euro used to have or the Gold Standard. Every single one ever tried in history has broken, and the same has gone for measures like tariffs and price ceilings that attempt to manipulate market conditions to create perpetual equilibrium.
Nobody has quite as much power as they think they do... And there may be something to adopting some Buddhist wisdom here. Only Westerners think they can replace natural cycles from nature with artificial linear constructs. Nature always wins out in the end and the fact that Chinese recognize the cyclical nature of the world economy is a big part of why they will soon displace the US as the financial capital.
heywood on 21/5/2018 at 17:44
Economic growth is the antithesis of a problem. Our long history of mostly sustained economic growth gave us the longevity and standard of living we enjoy today, and the spare capacity to produce art, explore the solar system, enjoy leisure, etc.
Scarcity of resources is also not a problem. When a resource becomes scarce, it's price rises, consumption of that resource declines, people find alternative resources, or more efficient ways to use the resource.
Global warming IS the problem, and it is mainly caused by burning carbon-based fuels. The problem is that the fuels are not scarce enough, so their rate of consumption remains high. The solution is pretty straightforward: make them artificially scarce via a capped carbon market. There are already plenty of examples showing that it works to reduce emissions and still allows for economic growth. My state is one of 10 which are part of a regional cap & trade system, and emissions from our electricity generation sector are less than half of what they were in 2005. And Europe has shown it can work on a multi-national scale. China just launched their carbon market last year.
All that's lacking to implement this on a broader scale is political will. No need for socialism or population control or a zero-growth economy.
I think the bigger challenge is where industrialization is taking place in the developing world. Fossils fuel energy is low tech and will be increasingly cheap on the global market as petro-states look to find new buyers to replace the declining demand from the US, China, Europe. To mitigate that, we should incentivize or even subsidize the export of non-fossil fuel energy technology to the developing world.
Azaran on 21/5/2018 at 19:25
Another challenge will be to convince most of the population that action needs to be taken. There's still huge swathes of the population in the west who:
- Believe global warming is a hoax invented by the New World Order/Illuminati to take away their cars and force them to pay carbon tax (yes, look up most big posts on global warming on Facebook, and you'll see half the people making inane comments that usually revolve around the above)
- Think that overpopulation is also another lie (again, invented by the evil Illuminati cabal) as an excuse for a future human extermination program
Wynne on 21/5/2018 at 23:35
Having lived in Belgium, I've got to say, principles of socialism implemented carefully and wisely into a primarily capitalist society can cure a lot of the evils of unchecked capitalism which lead to the need for revolution. Somebody tried in this country to do that, to implement populist policies, but our government is extremely corrupt and half the population is apathetic. That's pretty much the main issue in the US right now. I don't have all the answers, but we need at least a majority of politicians who are concerned with more than profit, and we barely have any of those. It has to change.
Wolf-PAC, Brand New Congress (the bi-partisan option), and Justice Democrats are all part of that, if you ask me.