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%.
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.
What I’m about to type might come as a nitpick and missing the point so let me say this upfront: This post is very much true. Cars have gotten way too big and the loopholes in government laws and environmental regulations that allow this shit to happen need to be closed. Consumers should also be smarter and more diligent with their purchases.
With that said, there’s a small disparity with the car example. The car on the left (BMW 3 Series E30, I think) would be classified as a sedan. The car on the right (BMW X series, don’t know which specifically) would classified as an SUV, more specifically the (abysmal) crossover category.
Because there are still a lot of cars being made and sold. They’re a big part of every manufacturer’s product line. How many new dumb phones were released in the past 2 years?
I would argue an SUV sucks even for that purpose. And SUV has less cargo space than even a minivan, and is typically less fuel efficient. In general, the majority of SUVs fail to live up to the Sport or Utility functions of their name. They’re just a grossly inefficient oversized sedan.
As an example, I just moved someone out of a dorm yesterday and ended up having to haul a sizeable portion of my daughter’s roommate’s belongings in my van on top of my daughter’s stuff because her roommate’s SUV couldn’t do the job. And my daughter has more stuff. And from the conversation we had, my van gets 5mpg more than her Ford Edge.
I don’t disagree with you there, but my intention wasn’t to compare SUVs/CUVs to other cargo carrying vehicles so much as to point out that sedans and coupes are not nearly as well suited to hauling gear/equipment/boxes.
I am curious which minivan you have, I’m considering getting back into my moonlighting gig and having options for a more fuel efficient vehicle would be good to keep in mind.
Yeah that looks like a really killer feature. would significantly help with the pelican case and (future) roadcases. I have a similar feature in my nissan rogue, but the “stowing” of the seats feels a little hinky.
Mine stow completely flat, the anchor points for the seats are in recesses so they are flush with the floor. I’ve got pretty much the same storage space in my van as I had in my old Ranger with the truck cap on. Maybe a few inches less vertical space, but no fender humps.
Nice alright, yeah with mine, the seats will fold and you have these moving platforms that you can raise to match the seat back level but you can’t put much if any weight on the platform. It’s a cool idea but wasn’t particularly well designed.
Downvoting and ghosting someone who is giving valid information based on being the first to arrive and the very last to leave for dozens of shows often times getting home around 6am or 10am in the morning the next day is pretty dickish.
I’m not forcing anyone to like what I’m saying, I simply ask that the experiences being acknowledged for what they are which only one or two people seem to be doing.
You are attempting to refute data with an anecdote. The assertion isn’t that no SUV is useful, it’s that they are disproportionately wasteful for their level of popularity.
This is a direct quote. Taken at face value, this sentence is saying “everything cars can do, SUVs can also do but SUVs are limited to exactly those capabilities and nothing else.” If we take a logical step, it’s reasonable to go from the quote and it’s breakdown to “SUVs have no real use” because they merely duplicate the capabilities of a car and having a redundant yet unique style of vehicle with no advantages of it’s own makes it pretty not useful.
This is the longer quote
SUVs also use more resources to run and be produced then small cars, without any advantage over them.
How are you getting from
without any advantage over them
to
assertion isn’t that no SUV is useful
? Cause I see nothing that directly supports that claim and implication + the internet is a pretty bad combo given the general lack of subtlety of blank text on a screen.
Edit:
You are attempting to refute data with an anecdote
I reread this, yes I’m using personal experience to refute a point. I won’t deny that, but neither will I deny the validity of this statement. "I was hauling gear that was simply too much for a sedan to handle. I own and haul a Pelican 1660 which is measured at 31.59 x 22.99 x 19.48 in (80.2 x 58.4 x 49.5 cm). That thing wasn’t fitting in a honda civic’s backdoor, let alone safely into the backseat. Then add a folding table 2 plastic tote boxes and my stagelighting bag? No way.
While the “without any advantage over them” is an exaggeration, the point is that SUVs are using a disproportionate amount of resources. A fraction of SUV drivers routinely use them for the unique situation you describe, or for any jobs that a car couldn’t do. I don’t begrudge anyone using the right tool for a job, though rental often would work for infrequent exceptional needs. But the OP is an important point about wastefulness, and focusing on minor semantics or individual use cases is a distraction.
You’re making an assumption that it’s an exaggeration. I actually touched on this earlier but we’re on the Internet and unless someone goes to lengths to make it clear they are exaggerating or being sarcastic or whatever, that kind of stuff does not convey.
Example, I fucking hate all ice cream.
Am I exaggerating or do I actually hate all ice cream?
I vaguely remember some quote from the 1990s along the lines of “if cars had had the same technological growth rate as computers, by now, they’d go bazillion kilometers with a drop of gasoline, had engines the size of sugar cubes, and would cost a penny and a half.”
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.
Interesting read. I’m inclined to agree with the author that the UN 2086 population peak is BS and humanity will hit population peak sooner (potentially in the first half of the century).
United Nations’ expert “model” appears to have picked an arbitrary long-term fertility rate out of who-knows-where to which all regions asymptote, abruptly abandoning their current declines to head for theory-land! I’m honestly a bit aghast.
Wouldn’t knowledge about crumple zones and need for space for things like airbags, make cars bigger?
Not saying that is the main reason, but size reduction may not be a factor to focus on its own, right?
Nah, we still make compact cars similar in size with the same safety features to econoboxes from 40 years ago. Like houses, people want more room in their vehicles than they had with the smaller cars plus some other misinformed choices like thinking bigger and taller means safer.
Plus along with the older small cars we also had the giant boats that got single digit mpg. It wasn’t like they were all small in the past.
Here is the same thing I posted, but reworded slightly to be more clear.
We make some cars now with modern safety feature that are big and some that are just as small as the econoboxes from 40 years ago. A Honda Fit for example is just as small, but with modern safety features.
In 1984 the smallest Volkswagen was the Polo, weighing 685 kg. Now it is the Up, weighing 991 kg. That's 45% more weight. Now you specifically didn't mention weight, but all that weight has to go somewhere, especially considering most materials mostly got lighter.
No, vehicles have gotten larger because of the same problem as most of the issues in the United States: politics!
You see automobile manufacturers have to meet an average fuel economy across their entire fleet under the CAFE (Corporate average fuel economy) act of 1975. CAFE was a good idea as it forced the auto industry into actually improving on fuel economy year after year throughout their entire fleet or be met with steep fines for ever 0.1mpg off the target.
In 2011 CAFE was changed which directly caused the auto market we have today. See in 2011 the formula on how you’d calculate your fleet’s avarage MPG got changed to now factor in vehicle footprint as a variable which auto manufactures quickly caught on to mean the larger a vehicle is the smaller their entire fleet’s MPG has to be.
On top of that in 2012 “medium-duty trucks” was added as their own category with a lower MPG requirement meaning if your truck or SUV fell into that category then you would have a smaller MPG target for your entire fleet.
Now put yourself into the shoes of an early 2010s auto manufacture, would you rather design small and light vehicles that require you to meet a pretty high fuel economy level across your entire product range or would you inflate the size of your vehicles and move all R&D into finding ways to get your entire fleet classified as a medium-duty truck/SUV with a smaller MPG requirement? Of course you are going to take the latter.
The changes to CAFE in the 2010s killed small vehicles as we knew it. Ensured light duty trucks stayed dead domestically built or chicken tax be dammed. Caused the explosion of crossover SUVs to flood the market. All while making vehicles more dangerous and worse for the environment.
I am not from North America. I’m in India.
Here, the average car has generally increased in size a bit, but doesn’t seem to be going too big. There are larger cars and they are indeed increasing in number, but due to our mixed traffic and high traffic density it is not that popular.
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”)
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