https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04029-8
The year 2024 must be a turning point for shifting policies away from gross domestic product and towards sustainable well-being. Here’s why and how.
The problem is that seeking growth at all costs allows the accumulation of economic and political power. The people in charge do not distinguish between personal success and a better world, and therefore see no difference between economic growth and a better world.
It also funds everyone's retirement. People start revolting pretty quickly when they learn they get paid almost nothing and they have to rely on a magic money making machine in the stock market to live out their twilight years.
Anything that allows people to retire and doesn't require unsustainable GDP growth I'm happy with LOL.
This is the biggest problem with economical growth.
All the FAANG or whatever their called these days can hit 1000% growth tomorrow, and suddenly, our economical growth skyrockets.
But that doesn't mean anything for the average person. At all.
The constant need for growth really bothers me. I live in a rural area. People move here because it's natural and quiet and cost of living is low. Then they complain that there is no Target and no Chik Fila and not enough jobs. The board of supervisors is full of developers. Once they finish building out the county we will be just like every other suburban hell.
Not just the constant need for that sort of growth. In our late-stage capitalist society, companies are expected to make more profit than last year every single year. As if that is somehow sustainable.
Apple has made record profits of $X billion dollars this quarter. However, that is only $3 billion more than last year same quarter.
You're right, Greg. One has to wonder: will Apple be bankrupt next year?
Working for a Fortune 500 and hearing executives talk is surreal. They straight up say things like "if you're not growing, you're failing". No thought at all as to how that's supposed to work in the long run. The post-pandemic surge in profits doesn't help; companies that usually don't get 15-20% profit margins suddenly saw that, and the expectation of shareholders is that they can keep doing that forever. That's insane.
Conversely, I'm also active in my local makerspace. We've grown massively in less than 10 years, and deliberately stopped taking new members for a few months because our volunteers were getting burned out. When we reopened, we kept the new member signups intentionally limited so certain areas (woodshop, mainly) would be able to absorb turnover without driving the trainers too hard. We still have net growth, but way slower than we were before. We're far from failing, and the MBAs running Fortune 500s can go fuck themselves.
And then they will leave for a more idyllic life in the country because it's so noisy.
I'm pretty sure the large open field behind my house, which used to be full of trees, is going to be turned into another gated neighborhood full of cookie cutter houses. And I just know someone is going to be close to my back yard, and they are going to whine about my wife's chickens, especially since one of them is a rooster.
So they will piss and moan and try to make us get rid of the rooster. And then they will probably get a small dog that yaps all night.
No, not FL. Judging by driving around the US it's happening all over. Walmarts and apartments and McDonalds everywhere you go. Many are fairly new and right next to rural land. No sidewalks or public transportation, just sprawl into rural areas.
The constant need for growth won't go away. As long as the population grows, economic output needs to grow. All those people need food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, random crap, work, etc.
Yes, in the Western World a lot of it is a distribution problem, but even if we solved that you still can't expect the rest of the world to just settle for lower standards of living than Europe and North America. They won't. And they shouldn't.
Capitalism has one positive, and that's the notion of competition leading to the best outcome as they try to win over consumers.
We've lost that though with how unfettered it's become in general. Companies merge and conspire, eliminating competition.
Public universities and research actually produce the most amount of innovation. Another one of capitalisms lies
There's a difference between lab bench research and discoveries and then actually making them into usable products on a mass scale. That's a big part of where engineering comes into focus, on that scale up. There's a lot of research that proves impractical in reality because the synthesis of a material is really finicky or the purification of it is exceedingly difficult.
That said, I actually agree that private industry shouldn't be part of this space. Companies shouldn't be sponsoring research and picking winners like this. We need something analogous to national labs that's focused solely on the scale up of discoveries -- taking something discovered in a university or national lab and making it usable for the everyday person. And from there companies can get licenses from the government to offer the technology to consumers and make their own innovations, all of which must be reported to the government.
... So I think I've just convinced myself that you're right and I agree with you, actually.
It's become more of a competition as to who can fool and subsequently fuck over the consumers more.
Exactly. We've let them become way too powerful. They shouldn't be able to do this.
Competition doesn't lead to innovation in improving people's lives, but company profits. See: enshittification.
I see that as a consequence of the absurd monopolies we have. The best product should be what's the most popular, and enshittification is counter to that. It tanks the product quality, and in a market with lots of competitors, it would be punished.
It is one of the consequences of monopolies, but monopolies are a consequence of economic competition.
The "winner" gets the losers stuff and customers (mergers for example), making the winner bigger and more able to manipulate the market to their benefit.
When there are few enough companies profits can be chased without consideration for anything else (planned obsolescence, shipping jobs outside the country, lay-offs, etc.)
So, like you said except in a for profit market, monopolies are inevitable.
In the absence of regulation, absolutely. If we had more stringent anti trust legislation though it might be possible to avoid.
The best product should not be what's most popular in Capitalism, what's profitable to produce is what's most profitable. With tons of competition, you just have competing levels of automation, corner cutting, and exploitation.
Competition and markets in general are the cause of enshittification.
Yep, Marx predicted this actually. A huge portion of Marx's literature is even more relevant today than ever before.
This is how capitalism has always worked.
When companies compete, eventually some of them lose. This means they go out of business.
The remaining companies become more powerful.
That's a fair point actually. Competition can only exist if there's an influx of new companies that's roughly the number of them going out of business.
Even then though there's an issue, because the companies which have been around the longest will have all the necessary equipment, which may be really expensive.
I'm not sure how we address this, but it's clear the government needs to step in.
"Best outcome" covers for a lot. The "best" coffee is still grown in the global south and shipped using grossly polluting methods. The "best" computer will eventually be obsolete e-waste with minimal recycling value. The "best" EV is still reliant on car-centric infrastructure that is strangling cities.
What is "best" is highly variable, and competition cannot possibly cover all possibilities of what is best.
A lifetime in sales, bulk in venture backed world.. the indefinite growth of growth expectations still boggles my mind.. you need servers to do stuff, I sell you servers. We make a living. We go home. The boss is satisfied that they make decent money and create jobs for all these people to support their families. That was fine.
Now.. EVERYthing you rely on comes from shareholder investments. We've watched the barbarians at the gates quietly get back on top (regulations matter; vote if you can't afford your bills) as PE has driven the entire trillion dollar consumer goods market into margins driven late stage startup practices. Homes and real estate are unoccupied market driving investment assets more bundled up in funds than before '08.
That's fine when I'm taking a risk bringing a new product or business to market to innovate a business process or introduce a new consumer product. Not when people need to be able to afford a loaf of bread, rent and a car payment.
It drives me fucking nuts that continued growth isn't enough - 10% growth two years in a row will tank you.
Nope you have to gain an ADDITIONAL 10% growth every year or RIP your company.
"Fuck more!"
How can we expect those lines to keep going up without a steady supply of fresh recruits for the grinder.
I'd bet at a certain point of societal development economic growth is linked with many positives. Unfortunately, we probably adopted it as our only metric and the min/max'ers have taken it to its most extreme. Now when we look at the data we are way outside the range where it's a useful indicator. Our targets are too high and we need to monitor other indicators of prosperity.
If your only goal is that most people can live decently and reduce exploitation, abuse, and such, yeah, sure.
But if you just want to amass money, then, no.
A choice was made.
Economic growth is fine to a point. Problem is measuring economic growth through the arbitrary price of a small group of companies using a market system designed for gambling rather than long-term investing. Better is to base it on the amount of goods exchanged across all levels of society. When the top has all the money and increases their stock prices by buying and selling their own stocks, and the rest can't afford to participate in the economy beyond necessities, that's not a good economy.
Unpopular opinion: If we ended fossil fuel use immediately a lot of people would die and the entire economy would collapse. People would starve because stores wouldn't be stocked. People would freeze to death because they wouldn't be able to heat their homes. Looting and violence would soon follow.
The only people who would likely be ok are the ultra wealthy.
Change takes time and right now there are no alternatives that can immediately absorb the extra load from cutting off fossil fuels.
The truly unpopular opinion is the one you're pretending is popular, people aren't advocating for immediate replacement without building up green energy and replacing it entirely.
You realize that people need money to actually fucking feed themselves and put a roof over their head, right?
Growth and stability of necessities aren't mutually required.
You can have controlled or even negative growth and plenty of food and necessities.
Imagine it this way: what if we made it completely illegal to make party favors and other single-use items with no benefit? Growth would lower, but food production isn't hurt in the slightest, and other jobs can exist.
A degrowth society has to be an equitable society. Otherwise your criticism is entirely valid.
We are going to have a degrowth system regardless of any policy decisions, as the current growth system is burning through critical resources and destroying the environment. We can either plan for this, or we can have an unplanned existential civilizational crisis.
Degrowth for the west, let the rest of the world suffer yeaaaaaa. Everyone knows only the west matters anyways.
By equitable I meant 'equitable for everyone' not equitable for only the people of the core of the empire.
I mean we are saying the same thing.... i am just saying that thinking this way is pretty elitist. There are developing african and asian countries that will soon surpass the US and EU in population. Im sure they will have the same mindset though.
If you don't think corporations and governments in Africa have the same idea that there should be endless growth, I suggest you read up on them.
My last like 5 posts on this have been sarcastic. I think its incorrect to think that environmental policy starts and stops with the west. I also think its unrealistic to think a developing country doesnt aspire to become just as waste hungry.
We need equalization, which means drastic cuts for the west and massive leaps for the developing world.
It's too late for sentiments, my friend. We are not the winners of this game, but we might all be losers if we don't reduce our habits of reckless consumption.
Yes, i have the same sentiment. I have been calling for everyone to accept higher taxes for years. Garnish wages, let the extreme wealth gap grow wider. If everyone is poor then we dont have to worry about what shiny thing to buy as long as we can get that dog meat on the table.
SO TRUE! My malnutrition living in central america has stunted my growth but if I lived on the plentiful acid you provide then some day my progeny can grow big and strong like yourself.
staying fed has always been a problem in central and south america. you can't grow big crops without wiping out large swaths of rain forest. stop cutting down rain forests. stop following catholic traditions that encourage large families. ya'll should be having way less kids. the ecosystem just can't support large populations. you'd be better off going back to living in small units dependent on hunting and fishing.
sorry bro. that's just how life works. you really don't want what america has. cherish what you have.
I know you put a /s in there, but that's actually spot on. It's very difficult to convince people to give a damn about nature if they don't have decent food, shelter and a hopeful future for their children.
e: spelling
Unfortunately, a healthy nature is required to keep all those, it's just not quite as visible or explicit as a bag of money.
What is not required is billions of profit going in the pockets of a few extremely rich investors though, that money could easily be used for improvements to our planet without impacting the livelihoods of anyone.
Yes, and no. I'm quite convinced that humanity can make a decent living for itself (i.e, more pleasant than that of the average current day human) even if we fuck up nature beyond our current day recognition. It's worth considering that more than half of humanity lives in urban environments, and a majority of land area is cultivated in some way.
However, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry, or shouldn't try.
Earth is our heritage, and what we make of it will be the legacy that future humans remember the 21st century by. I'd much rather have our great-great grandkids frolicking in the grass under a pearl blue sky than in concrete caves to protect them from neverending storms and scorching deserts.
I don't know. I rather doubt our bodies can evolve and adapt to a new environment before we die out. At the very least, even if we do take to the stars, whatever survives will have evolved to something new
See I have the same sentiment, yet i get downvoted. The only people screaming are the ones already in good situations.
Can we start with the wealth of the 1st world and give it to everyone else? Im just a poor Guatemalan man working 2 jobs to sustain my family of 8. I will spend your money buying things I dont need just as much as you but ill be happy to take your wealth.
I'm all for seeing what that looks like. I promise I have little more than you. I'm interested in stripping away excess profits and seeing what level of luxury the world gets to enjoy in an egalitarian economy.
