This makes sense for mid-latitudes, but the timing of peak power will depend on how much energy the current youth in India and children in central Africa will aspire to use as they get older. That’s hard to ‘predict’ - it’s their choice of development pathway, but hope they don’t follow China’s route with so much cement, steel, roads, there are other options.
The global south will need a lot of air conditioning to simply survive. However, a lot of that energy should be carbon neutral if renewable trends continue.
Along with basic income, there’ll need to be basic volunteering, where everybody contributes a number of hours within their ability to their local community, otherwise (outside of sci-fi scenarios where machines of loving grace look after us) the system will collapse.
You’ll still work and still get the means to live, but the two won’t be linked as an exchange.
UBI means everybody gets a certain amount of money no questions asked. It does not mean wage work is illegal. In fact most actual plans presume a payment, which is just about enough to cover the basics. So if you want more, you have to work for it. The big advantages is that people are not forced into jobs they hate and it allows everybody to take more risks in terms of say art, starting new companies or working as an independent contractor.
One thing not talked about as a positive is the notion that some folks will sit on their ass and just drink/smoke and watch tv or such. This cracks me up as these folks do not improve the workforce when they are forced into it. My hope is that I could work without those whose prescence actually increases the amount of work needed and cause the results to be worse. Unfotunately many of those will still be "working" as they like nice things but hopefully it will at least lessen those situations.
Even without UBI there’s people who sit in their ass and drink/smoke/watch TV/etc. But without UBI they are more prone to resort to petty theft or other antisocial activities to support that habit. UBI pilot programs have demonstrably shown a decrease in crime, because it removes one of the incentives for it.
exactly. the main point is folks like that are not going to be a net positive if you put the screws to them. We win out if we let people follow what they want or are compensated enough to do what they are willing to do.
one of the big results out of the various UBI trials so far is that even with so-called “freeloaders”, overall productivity goes up – and we can see similar results in housing (providing housing for the unhoused saves money for the whole society) and health care (taking care of everyone costs less than gatekeeping whether you “qualify”)
The problem is that economic growth has become the performance metric. You see the same happen at a smaller scale in companies, where a metric to measure performance ends up being the only target of the employer, instead of the actual task. For example, a call center may have a calls per day bonus, which means that most employees will be penalized for longer calls, leading them to be more pushy and cut corners, leading to customer dissatisfaction with their experience.
In order to encourage degrowth the metric has to change. It is clear that GDP is no longer a sufficient measure, because it considers neither sustainability nor equality. But without an alternative measurement to replace it economists will reject degrowth as a successful strategy because they can’t see past the performance metrics they have accepted as a de facto standard.
Metrics is one problem. However UBI solves another very real problem. When you shrink GDP, you reduce the material wealth available of the group. UBI makes sure everybody has a certain minimal standard of material wellbeing, so cutting GDP does not hurt the poor, but only the rich. This is one of the differences between degrowing an economy and a recession.
Oh yeah, I’m not against UBI, with or without degrowth.
Now, the way I see it, the article starts with explaining why degrowth is necessary (sustainability), then focuses on what’s necessary to make degrowth practical (UBI). But degrowth as policy is only viable if we can measure its success, and GDP is not going to do that. So we need a new performance metric IMO, something like economic equilibrium (see what I did there?).
There’s heaps, CO2, ecological health, happiness, life satisfaction, health, wealth equality just off the top of my head. Makes sense to use some combined and probably iterated (perhaps (direct) democratically) metric, one of the reasons we’re in this mess is oversimplification to just money as a metric.
I disagree that we should try to replace GDP with one metric. The world is too complicated for that. What we should do instead is look at multiple metrics and have targets for each of those metrics. Doughnut economics is a pretty decent framework for that. It uses consumption limits in form of cliamte change, chemical pollution, biodiversity, land use, water consumption and so forth on one hand and on the other site targets like food security, life expectancy, equality(GINI, but also race and gender), energy, water access and so forth. This is much better as it can be much more easily adapted to changing dangers and the situation. Water is for example much less of a problem for a country like Norway, then for say Iraq. So they would focus on different metrics.
I didn’t mean to imply that GDP should be replaced with another single metric, and I totally agree that doing so just perpetuates the cycle. Instead, my argument is that GDP should no longer be used as a metric of success, because its use has been bastardized. When “the economy” is doing better because more transactions are being made while class inequality is worsening and standards of living are dropping, then the measurement used is flawed.
Hence, given the immediate relevance of the monetary growth imperative for degrowth, one would expect that degrowth scholarship would feature the issue of money rather prominently. The same is true for the development of concrete policies addressing distributional issues or monetary system design. However, a lack of concrete policy proposals from the degrowth literature has been lamented repeatedly over the years in different contexts…
This is my criticism of most leftist ideas: how do you get from here to there? Most of the stuff I’ve read on degrowth is often about why it matters based on the result it’s intended to science, as if people aren’t taking the idea seriously enough. But there’s so little on how to get from here to there, what should happen if we do take the idea seriously.
In my experience, people aren’t taking the idea seriously enough. People are happy to geek out about electric cars and solar panels, but degrowth, despite the broad political consensus on the overwhelming evidence for its necessity, is still regarded as fringe.
Agreeing on goals is often a larger obstacle than finding solutions. How many leftists who were responsible for building sewers were sanitation engineers? Do you think they had a fleshed-out building codebook and peer-reviewed waste management proposal before they acquired political power? Or was that the easy part, compared to building a political coalition powerful enough to tax rich people who were fine with running sewage down the middle of the streets of working-class neighborhoods?
With the creation of the Socialist Party of America, this group formed the core of an element that favored reformism rather than revolution, de-emphasizing social theory and revolutionary rhetoric in favor of honest government and efforts to improve public health.
I think you’re both wrong and right. People do recognize the necessity of producing and consuming less. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to degrowth’s proposed goals.
But focusing on the goals as such is the more effective approach. If we want people to consume less, then we should give them a reason to do so. A day spent at an animal festival (just randomly off the top of my head) is one less spent doom scrolling and buying something from Amazon and is fun af.
Why people consume less matters less than that they do so, imho.
I think expecting people to consume less is the wrong approach. We should instead stop the wasteful production, then the people will naturally consume less. For example, banning production of SUVs.
Most living things stop growing at a point or do so much slower. There are systems which do not, like cancer for example. However killing the system you feed off is a bad strategy, if you only have a single one.
Evolution doesn’t demand anything, it’s literally about adaptation. The expectation of infinite growth inside an obviously finite system is the death cult.
I think having the focus be about reducing unnecessary and wasteful production to be a more accurate description, as we don’t want to degrow everything. Sectors of the society providing human and social value/services will need to grow. It is only the wasteful production that needs to be degrown.
Donut economics is maybe a better term for what degrowth wants to achieve. Namely that would be limiting enviromental impact to stay within planetary boundaries while providing a good quality of life for everybody. Other terms are wellbeing economy and so forth trying to grow different more diverse indicators. That is certainly an improvment over using basically only GDP.
As for talking about growth, the key has to be to frame it in a different way. Instead of calling for lower consumption, call for less work instead. Obviously less work leads to lower production, which means lower consumption. However it shows a direct practical advantage which everybody feels directly in their life. In practical terms that would be calls for earlier retirment, shorter work weeks, more vacation time and so forth. That really falls into the problematic framing of the enviromental footprint and consumption. Obviously that is part of the problem, but it pretends that consumers have all the power, when in fact production is mostly controlled by capitalists.
Speaking of capitalists, we always see these statistics comparing countries and then blaiming the wealthy countries for destroying the enviroment. However the much indicator of enviromental damage caused by an individual is their income, rather then their country of origin. That is to say an Indian billionaire is worse for the enviroment then a French mechanic. Obviously wealthy countries have more rich people. However when you have 1% of the global population responsible for 16% of emissions, we know were to start. That is btw more then the share of emissions of the US at 14.6% and a bit more then twice as much as the EUs at 7.9% in 2019, for 77 million people. The top 10% are responsible for 50% of global emissions. Besides some micro nations not country has a majority of its population being a member of the global 10%.
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