So - what do we do about economic growth?

[Raphael]

In recent years, a lot of people have become critical of the whole idea that the economy should grow. The Degrowth Movement argues that more economic growth will inevitably destroy our planet, and that we should therefore shrink the economy instead of growing it.

Now, ecologically speaking, they might well be right. But some aspects of their slogans and rhetoric leave me with the impression that they don’t really know all that much about basic economic ideas. For instance, they love to talk about “growth for growth’s sake”, as if there would be no reason to have economic growth except that some people have an unhealthy, irrational obsession with it. And they love to bring up capitalist greed, as if the only people who want economic growth would be greedy capitalists.

This attitude ignores that economic growth plays an important role in center-left economic ideas, too. Basically, for followers of center-left economic ideas, growth is the main reason why we don’t need austerity. If the economy keeps growing, public debts aren’t much of a problem, because they stay stable or even shrink if you measure their relative size compared to the total size of the economy.

Take away economic growth, and that logic falls apart. Suddenly, the state can’t keep borrowing money forever anymore, because total public debt keeps rising compared to the total size of the economy, and lenders will start asking how they are ever supposed to get anything back. Suddenly, the state runs out of lenders, runs out of money, and has to implement austerity. Degrowth supporters never really seem to think much about that.

But at the same time, their arguments about how the economy simply can’t keep on growing forever without running into physical limits, and that continued economic growth is destroying our planet, sound perfectly valid to me. So I’m not at all sure how to solve all this.

Now, one possible response might be that we should simply abolish the capitalist system altogether, and with it, the established economic logic. But I don’t see how that will solve the underlying “growth or austerity, but not neither”-problem. Even a post-capitalist country where everything has been nationalized still won’t be able to spend more than it has in revenues for long – except if it can find enough people willing to lend it money. Which will be difficult if its economy keeps shrinking.

So this all looks like it might well be one of those problems with no solution whatsoever to me.

[xxx]

And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.

[linguistcat]

I will start by saying I don't have an answer myself, I'm not an economist.

But I do think starting off with "Maybe we should throw out the logic of the current system" and then going on to suggest the start of a new system and then dismiss it based on the current logic, maybe you need to try harder to build a new system of logic first and start from first principles?

[Travis B.]

My thought is there is no reason why one must use the underlying logic of the current economic system as a basis in the first place, as linguistcat says.

[zompist]

There's a bunch of issues here.

On the whole it feels like performative nonsense. When leftists talk about "capitalism" it's almost always pure non-thought-- just a 150-year-old kneejerk.

Growth is good: it's why we could possibly have a pleasant world rather than a hellhole if it wealth was distributed in a more egalitarian way. The majority of the world needs more growth, not less: better houses, better water and food distribution, better medicine, better jobs. "Degrowth" is a sick joke for, say, Africa.

Growth is also productivity, and we need that too, even if we want a socialist rather than a capitalist world. Without continuing to develop renewable energy, "degrowth" either means continuing with fossil fuels and endangering the ecosphere, or letting billions of people die. And unless "degrowth" people really want to sow rice paddies for a living, we want machines and medicine and computers and transport.

Where they have a point, of course, is that growth can't come from increased population forever... indeed, not even for very much longer. However, this seems to be a problem that solves itself, with the right kind of growth. When people have a comfortable enough life, when women are not oppressed, people don't need or want 12 children... they barely want two.

And growth can't come from increased resource extraction forever. That's bad news for techbro venture capitalists, but not bad news for the planet. Again, productivity is a type of growth. Inventing a higher-efficiency engine is productivity; getting more out of the resources we have is productivity; using people's brains rather than their menial labor is productivity. Are we close to some sort of productivity cap?

[Ares Land]

I think economic growth becomes less interesting an indicator over time, and that realistically (even leaving environmental consideration aside) you just can't expect the economy of developped, wealthy, and industrialized countries to grow forever.

At some stage I feel economic growth and GDP size gradually lose any connection to standards of living anyway.
Here in France, lately we often hear or read economists envying US growth rate, as opposed to our sluggish economy. This is anecdotal, but I certainly don't get the impression -- from this board or other places -- that American standards of living are that great.

I definitely feel we should focus on other indicators a lot more. A few things I dislike about the degrowth movement:

• Call me cynical, but I'm always a little suspicious of people who counsel sobriety to the poor. There can be a moralistic element to the degrowth movement I don't like.
• Economically, some arguments don't make much sense to me.

But at the same time, their arguments about how the economy simply can’t keep on growing forever without running into physical limits, and that continued economic growth is destroying our planet, sound perfectly valid to me.

This one, for instance. GDP can be an infuriating and misleading indicator. Suppose we spent the next ten years replacing our cars by electric cars, electric bikes and new train lines -- that would be reflected in GDP and would translate into economic growth.

This attitude ignores that economic growth plays an important role in center-left economic ideas, too. Basically, for followers of center-left economic ideas, growth is the main reason why we don’t need austerity. If the economy keeps growing, public debts aren’t much of a problem, because they stay stable or even shrink if you measure their relative size compared to the total size of the economy.

That's interesting, because I think that's really the big fault with center-left reasoning. No matter how sound your economic measures are, you can't just take for granted that economic growth will follow -- it depends on too many other factors, and I think growth will get more and more fickle as the economy grows.
In France our last center-left president+legislature spent five years predicting a given growth rate, not getting as much as expected, reworking the budget in a panic. Excruciating.

Degrowth or not, we won't be getting huge growth rates anymore, which means if you want some sort of redistribution policy, we will have to be more radical: raise taxes, maybe even nationalize part of the economy.

As for the national debt... Frankly if it's a choice between social measures or defaulting on the national debt, I'd be in favor of a default. But it won't come to that.
I don't know how it is in other countries (I suspect it's the same everywhere) but in France the national debt is only important when left-wingers are in power. It was a huge, pressing issue from 2012 to 2017 and then suddenly the problem disappeared.

[zompist]

I don't know how it is in other countries (I suspect it's the same everywhere) but in France the national debt is only important when left-wingers are in power. It was a huge, pressing issue from 2012 to 2017 and then suddenly the problem disappeared.

Oh, that's for sure true here. The Very Serious People declare that the deficit is an enormous problem when Dems are in power, and completely shut up about when the GOP runs up much larger deficits. And the news media never catches on.

[Raphael]

Thank you, all interesting thoughts. I might have more to say later.

[malloc]

Apart from the physical limits of the earth, I feel like growth faces limits from our ability to consume. One person can only eat so much food, watch so many films, wear so many clothes, and so forth in one day. Growth makes sense when everyone is starving from chronically scarce food, but less so when everyone already has everything they could possibly need. Suppose you grow one ton of food for every person on earth per day. The vast majority of that food is going to waste because nobody can eat that much. Likewise nobody can wear multiple pairs of shoes at once or drive more than one vehicle at the same time.

[zompist]

Apart from the physical limits of the earth, I feel like growth faces limits from our ability to consume. One person can only eat so much food, watch so many films, wear so many clothes, and so forth in one day. Growth makes sense when everyone is starving from chronically scarce food, but less so when everyone already has everything they could possibly need. Suppose you grow one ton of food for every person on earth per day. The vast majority of that food is going to waste because nobody can eat that much. Likewise nobody can wear multiple pairs of shoes at once or drive more than one vehicle at the same time.

That's pretty much why no one is going to become a megabillionaire as a shoe tycoon. And why it's not necessarily smart to start up yet another streaming service. But the vast majority of people on earth could consume more, and would love to.

It's interesting that you mention clothes as a consumer good. Would you like to spend your life growing cotton, spinning thread, and weaving clothes? (Spinning takes a shitload of time. To keep up with it, women used to have to have a spindle with them at all times and multitask.) I doubt it; you're probably happy to go buy a shirt at the store. That's growth and productivity for you.

Your movie example is more equivocal. Marketizing entertainment is arguably a huge positive: vastly more people can access art, and also vastly more can make a living at it. But it's also a loss, in that local amateur entertainment is lost, and the market is far more hierarchical. Still, if you look at a medieval noble's bookshelf, with its two dozen or so books bolted to the shelf so they couldn't be stolen, and compare it to the bookshelves in my office, plus the far greater resources available at the library, the bookstore, and online, it's hard to dispute another win for growth and productivity.

You can certainly say that waste is a big problem in the US, and misallocation of resources in general. But "growth" is a bad analysis of what the problem is. I think we'd make a lot more progress if we focused on incentives (i.e. who profits and why), and externalities (i.e. who pays when the profiteers can do as they like).

[malloc]

It's interesting that you mention clothes as a consumer good. Would you like to spend your life growing cotton, spinning thread, and weaving clothes? (Spinning takes a shitload of time. To keep up with it, women used to have to have a spindle with them at all times and multitask.) I doubt it; you're probably happy to go buy a shirt at the store. That's growth and productivity for you.

Sure but once you've eliminated the toil of textiles and maximized clothing production, there are hard practical limits to how much clothing people really need. Good clothes can last for years and it makes no sense to insist on people buying whole new sets of clothing at ever shortening intervals. If the clothing industry keeps growing indefinitely, eventually people will have to buy new clothes everyday simply to keep sales from slacking.

Your movie example is more equivocal. Marketizing entertainment is arguably a huge positive: vastly more people can access art, and also vastly more can make a living at it. But it's also a loss, in that local amateur entertainment is lost, and the market is far more hierarchical. Still, if you look at a medieval noble's bookshelf, with its two dozen or so books bolted to the shelf so they couldn't be stolen, and compare it to the bookshelves in my office, plus the far greater resources available at the library, the bookstore, and online, it's hard to dispute another win for growth and productivity.

Except that media takes time to consume by its very nature, putting inherent limits on how much media any individual can consume. Even if you had all the leisure time in the world and no need for sleep, you can only watch twenty-four hours of film per day. You cannot squeeze any more cinema into your day without time travel.

Let me stress that I am hardly a zealot for degrowth by any means. I have no illusions about the pervasive poverty of the Middle Ages nor do I advocate returning to such conditions as you seem to suggest. I understand perfectly well that economic growth has improved living standards greatly over the past few centuries. But there are obvious limits to how much you can increase productivity before you have more stuff than people can reasonably consume or would even benefit from consuming. Going from five-hundred to two-thousand calories per day means the difference between starvation and health. But going from two-thousand to ten-thousand calories per day leads to heart disease and diabetes. There comes a point where further economic growth demands a preposterous and unrealistic level of consumerism to sustain.

[zompist]

It's interesting that you mention clothes as a consumer good. Would you like to spend your life growing cotton, spinning thread, and weaving clothes? (Spinning takes a shitload of time. To keep up with it, women used to have to have a spindle with them at all times and multitask.) I doubt it; you're probably happy to go buy a shirt at the store. That's growth and productivity for you.

Sure but once you've eliminated the toil of textiles and maximized clothing production, there are hard practical limits to how much clothing people really need. Good clothes can last for years and it makes no sense to insist on people buying whole new sets of clothing at ever shortening intervals. If the clothing industry keeps growing indefinitely, eventually people will have to buy new clothes everyday simply to keep sales from slacking.

You're right in a way— as I said, no one is going to becoming a shoe baron. But you could have made the same argument in 1900: do people really need more than one set of clothes and one pair of shoes? Yet I'm willing to bet you have at least a week's worth, probably more. Plus people have perceived needs that they didn't when they were poorer: separate outfits for different seasons, fancy outfits for weddings or interviews, special outfits for sports. Do you know what people will want (and think they need) in 2523?

Except that media takes time to consume by its very nature, putting inherent limits on how much media any individual can consume. Even if you had all the leisure time in the world and no need for sleep, you can only watch twenty-four hours of film per day. You cannot squeeze any more cinema into your day without time travel.

You could once have met your entertainment needs for free, by listening to your grandfather's stories. Now you have multiple options, and it's a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry. Plus, a lot of that entertainment is extremely expensive to produce. I'm willing to bet on this: come back in 500 years and we'll see if the entertainment industry is bigger then than it is today.

[malloc]

You're right in a way— as I said, no one is going to becoming a shoe baron. But you could have made the same argument in 1900: do people really need more than one set of clothes and one pair of shoes? Yet I'm willing to bet you have at least a week's worth, probably more. Plus people have perceived needs that they didn't when they were poorer: separate outfits for different seasons, fancy outfits for weddings or interviews, special outfits for sports. Do you know what people will want (and think they need) in 2523?

So your solution to saturated demand for clothing is convincing everyone that they need more and more specialized clothes? You are no longer talking about satisfying authentic needs like enough food for good health but convincing people they want objectively useless stuff just to keep the economy growing. Perhaps one day, with enough advertisement bombarding them, people will come to believe that they need more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Perhaps they will rent dozens of storage lockers for all the clothes they only wear on Independence Day in odd numbered years or whatever else. But that sounds less like economic growth lifting peasants out of misery and more like corporations convincing us that we must live like Ancien Régime aristocrats to have fulfilling lives so they can sell us more and more shit.

You could once have met your entertainment needs for free, by listening to your grandfather's stories. Now you have multiple options, and it's a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry. Plus, a lot of that entertainment is extremely expensive to produce. I'm willing to bet on this: come back in 500 years and we'll see if the entertainment industry is bigger then than it is today.

It certainly has room for growth, but I cannot see it growing indefinitely without the absurd situation of people spending all their waking hours watching a dozen movies all at once. Imagine if the film industry increased its productivity a thousand-fold. The average person would have to watch a thousand times more films to keep it afloat. Can you really imagine yourself watching several new films every day instead once every few months?

[zompist]

You're right in a way— as I said, no one is going to becoming a shoe baron. But you could have made the same argument in 1900: do people really need more than one set of clothes and one pair of shoes? Yet I'm willing to bet you have at least a week's worth, probably more. Plus people have perceived needs that they didn't when they were poorer: separate outfits for different seasons, fancy outfits for weddings or interviews, special outfits for sports. Do you know what people will want (and think they need) in 2523?

So your solution to saturated demand for clothing is convincing everyone that they need more and more specialized clothes? You are no longer talking about satisfying authentic needs like enough food for good health but convincing people they want objectively useless stuff just to keep the economy growing.

I'm not giving a "solution", I'm describing the modern world. Again, I'll bet you have more than one change of clothes. If you want to live like a hermit, go do it, but don't expect everyone else to want that.

It certainly has room for growth, but I cannot see it growing indefinitely without the absurd situation of people spending all their waking hours watching a dozen movies all at once. Imagine if the film industry increased its productivity a thousand-fold.

How big was the movie industry in 1800?

You're fixating on one type of growth: making more of the things we make right now. Someone in 1800 could, absolutely correctly, argue that the world economy could not grow indefinitely by making more turnips, horseshoes, and whist decks. But it would have nothing to do with proving anything about growth.

[malloc]

I'm not giving a "solution", I'm describing the modern world. Again, I'll bet you have more than one change of clothes. If you want to live like a hermit, go do it, but don't expect everyone else to want that.

Sure but they are few enough in number that I can wear all of them regularly. My quality of life would hardly improve if I had so many clothes that I needed to rent a storage locker for most of them. There are numerous serious problems in my life, but they certainly don't include a paucity of clothes or other luxury items. I hardly consider it particularly radical, let alone hermetic, to question the value of five hundred changes of clothing.

You're fixating on one type of growth: making more of the things we make right now. Someone in 1800 could, absolutely correctly, argue that the world economy could not grow indefinitely by making more turnips, horseshoes, and whist decks. But it would have nothing to do with proving anything about growth.

But the basic point remains the same regardless of specific items. Given the fundamentals of human psychology and physiology, not to mention time and space, there are limits on how much we can practically consume. You can invent new types of media, new kitchen appliances, and so forth, but those have to compete with the limits of our attention and desire as well as the leisure time and physical space available to us. Watching films competes with reading books and playing video games for our time, but also with eating out at restaurants, playing golf, getting haircuts, and whatever else we might do with our waking hours.

[jcb]

Except that media takes time to consume by its very nature, putting inherent limits on how much media any individual can consume. Even if you had all the leisure time in the world and no need for sleep, you can only watch twenty-four hours of film per day. You cannot squeeze any more cinema into your day without time travel.

Actually, in a way, you *can* watch more than 24 hours of video per day, if you speed up the playback of the video. I use an extension called "Youtube Playback Speed Control", and according to it, I've saved "16 DAYS 08 HOURS 52 MINUTES 44.21 SECONDS" of time watching youtube over the years. That's a significant chunk of time!

[Raphael]

Given the fundamentals of human psychology and physiology, not to mention time and space, there are limits on how much we can practically consume.

My impression is that simply having everyone in the world consume as much as the richest inhabitants of the richest countries in the world consume now would already mean a much larger economy than we have now. And, of course, there are people who already consume as much as the richest inhabitants of the richest countries in the world consume now, so it's principally humanly possible. But that would, of course, be environmentally completely unsustainable, which brings us back to the original problem.

[kodé]

Not to tread (hehe) the shoe-and-clothes argument into the ground, but the main reason most people in richer-than-average areas buy so many clothes is for fashion, not utility. Some of this is social trendiness, some of this is esthetics, and some is just needing a change! A considerable chunk of people have a wardrobe that would would make nobles from a couple hundred years ago green with envy. So clothes consumption should at the very least stay at the same rate, but we should expect it to keep increasing — as long as people get wealthier, they’ll keep buying more thing that they don’t “need” from a moralizing perspective.

And, it doesn’t necessary have to be an environmental problem like the way the clothes industry is today. In the future (and not too distantly), all unwanted clothes can be recycled and remade into new clothes (or something similar), and if energy use gets less pollutionary , we can increase production and sales of clothes — and thus economic growth —without increasing the negative environmental effects that increased production brings currently.

[Ares Land]

Apart from the physical limits of the earth, I feel like growth faces limits from our ability to consume.

I really think you're onto something here.

Once you reach the relative luxury of the Western World, with two cars per household, cheap food and clothing and every kind of smart device and kitchen appliances, that extra percent of GDP growth is increasingly harder to get.

I don't think we're done with economic growth forever, or that we've reached the pinnacle of civilization, but we should keep in mind that we've picked the low hanging fruit up to now.

Excess consumerism and planned consumerism are problems too. I'm not an ascete by any means, but these are issues that should be adressed. Not only for the environmental aspects, but also because energies would be better spent ensuring more equitable repartition of wealth and also on working less.

[Torco]

Unlike advocates of degrowth, I think Infinite growth on a finite planet is perfectly possible. this is because in principle there is no limit to the amount of things which can be privatized and made rentable, leasable or otherwise monetizable private property: sure, there is a finite amount of matter on planet earth, but because merchandises can be immaterial we can extend growth by making more things merchandises that were previously not: we already did this with culture, to a degree, but the sky is the limit: we can privatize names, concepts, the major scale, colors, programming languages, the concept of a button on a GUI, hobbies, genetic sequences, you name it: we can make it so you have to spend seventy thousand trillion dollars per minute, with extensive calculations performed automatically by computers as to okay, you breathed seven times, that's this much money, also you're called Bob and that's 3 bucks per second that you're called that, then you sung a song in your head, that's 1 dollar for the royalties, then six bucks per second because of the rent you agreed to when you got that operation that saved your life, then the rent on your corneas, then the rent on that gene which you have and which is owned by the Arasaka corporation, etcetera etcetera. similarly, you could make supply chains more and more complicated to squeeze more and more profit out of each transaction: we already do this: chileans often eat peaches grown in chile, shipped to the philipines for canning, and then shipped back to chile for sale to consumers, possibly with a stop in Brazil for labeling them with paper grown in brazil, processed in China and then shipped back to brazil to be stuck onto the cans. There is also no hard limits on how many shirts people can buy, necessarily: you could have people buying seventeen shirts per workday, or why not a thousand? they just wear one, throw away the rest, pay the throwing away fee while they're at it because the concept of throwing away a shirt is owned by the Arasaka corporation, and then the fabrics get shredded, reconstituted into new shirts, royalties paid on the colors and shapes stamped onto the shirts, and so on and so on. because money is fictive, infinite money can be squeezed out of finite space, time and matter relatively easily. of course, this is all quite dystopic, but neither reality nor capitalists care.

I also think that despite zompist's assertion otherwise capitalism is an actual system with actual, concrete characterstics which matters for such questions: capitalism doesn't really work if the economy in terms of units currency exchanged per unit time does not grow. this is different from other economic systems that do not exhibit this trait, and that might work under no growth or degrowth. we don't *have* to degrow, but if we want to, that's going to take either scaling back or doing away with capitalism.

why would one want degrowth? the thing that has to be understood in order for the idea of degrowth to make sense is that not all exchanges of currency necessarily are good, actually, and that not all that is good necessarily needs be an exchange of currency.

Growth is good: it's why we could possibly have a pleasant world rather than a hellhole if it wealth was distributed in a more egalitarian way. The majority of the world needs more growth, not less: better houses, better water and food distribution, better medicine, better jobs. "Degrowth" is a sick joke for, say, Africa.

this is an excellent example of this notion that good and growth are the same: what people need, ultimately, are houses, medicine, food, etcetera etcetera, not dollars or central african francs: and sure, sometimes those things are obtained through exchanges of currency, but this is an artifice of capitalism and the treatment of every conceivable good as a merchandise to be owned, bought, rented, leased and sold, not a necessary fact of the world: people could, in principle, have a house without spending any money: they can just, you know, go somewhere, chop down trees, and build a house and then live in it. they could also, in principle, send a request to the state app and just get a permission slip to live in whatever street 398 apartment B. there are, of course, social obstacles to this, namely that if they do the police will come and evict them, or that such an app does not currently exist because we can't have people having goods without paying for them, but again, those facts are contingent. and in the reverse, just like not all goods are necessarily just the result of exchanging units currency, not all exchanges of currency are themselves goods. obvious examples are things like hiring henchmen to kill somebody, but less obvious examples are, say, the advertising industry, those call centers that spam people, 90 year copyright protections, or the institution of rent.

a corollary of this is that while a lot of exchanges of units of currency do come from transactions which are also productive, like if I build a chair and somebody needs a chair and buys it, or if i use the profits from that chair to buy some machine that lets me make those chairs more cheaply, a lot of them -and thus a lot of economic growth- come from marketization of goods which were not in the market before: not that i'm advocating women be kept barefoot and pregnant, of course, but take childcare: used to be childcare would function outside of the market: people just took care of their kids, mostly women: but as women enter the workforce childcare labour more and more has to be delegated to market institutions: daycares, schools, household workers if you're rich, whatever: it's not at all clear that the post-marketization state of affairs is one where more useful work is done, it's just that a thing that wasn't mediated by money comes to be mediated by money, thus causing economic growth. Same with enclosure, same with the privatization of culture, same with many many other things. perhaps the most clear example of this would be to imagine the privatization of air: as it stands now, everyone just breathes, no one charges you for it, we all enjoy the good of breathing *outside of the markett* but if you privatize air that would certainly increase the amount of dollars exchanged per unit time: line goes up, yes, but is anyone better off as a result of that economic growth? only the most fanatical libertarian would say yes.

anyway talk of degrowth is almost synonymous with talk of anticapitalim, because sure, within capitalism degrowth would be a catastrophe: thing is, within capitalism growth is also a catastrophe, and will be more and more: and this isn't just fossil fuels, though thats a big part of it: slavery in coltan mines, wars to open up countries for trade, etcetera etcetera. still, the objection is not without merit completely: if we want the kind of degrowth that doesn't come coupled to just more people starving to death etcetera, the kind of degrowth that comes with more good instead of with less goods, that necessarily entails the reverse process as privatization: if we keep treating every good as something you only access through exchanges of money and we try to shrink the economy, yeah, duh, fewer people will have access to fewer goods. But the deprivatization of air, or of housing, or of anything else, is something different: it's not -at least necessarily- saying "lets let fewer people pay for and therefore access air (or housing)", but rather saying something like "you know what? let's not treat this good as a merchandise anymore". we know how to do this trick of not treating things as merchandises, we do it with kidneys, for example.