Zompist Bboard Again

Torco wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 10:33 am 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.

I don't know what assertion you're referring to.

If you're talking about actual capital, I mostly agree with you. The best propaganda against early 21C capitalism is itself, and enormous harm is being done by people who demand 10% growth when the economy is only growing 3%.

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

I was making what i think is a very mild point: almost everyone would prefer to live in the modern world rather than the median job— starving peasant– any time in the last 5,000 years. Apparently you read this as a paean to currency? I hate to bring up Marxism with a Marxist, but didn't the dude make the point that there was a transition from feudalism to capitalism, from the nobles to the bourgeois, and that this was a good thing, and even had to precede the transition to communism? Graeber has a pretty good analysis of how marketization went from a tiny to an overwhelming part of society. (In fact, he points out that it's far from having triumphed. Many institutions, from families to churches to corporations, operate on a communistic basis internally.)

anyway talk of degrowth is almost synonymous with talk of anticapitalim,

I suppose this will lead into another infinite bit of conworlding, namely describing nonexistent communist economies; but I wish lefties would learn to distinguish concepts like growth, population size, density, technological level, development, and capitaism.

You're not a First Worlder, but you do live in one of the richest countries in South America— if the world's wealth was distributed evenly Chile's standard of living would go down, not up. (Same with China, by the way.) I think "degrowth" is a kick in the balls to just about everyone in Africa, or Haiti, or Bolivia; they need more things, not less. And the thing is, "taking things away from the rich" has never worked as a development strategy. Africa doesn't need a one-time shipment of the contents of Elon Musk's house; it needs development, that is, growth.

It would be nice if more leftists could admit that this is a hard problem and that authoritarian communist approaches were terrible. Communists do normally admit that something was off in the USSR and Mao's China, but they just can't say what it was. Um, maybe the murderous authoritarianism? But when you take that away, there are almost no actual models left, which means we're talking about a new, untried system. And most people who peddle new, untried systems are not to be trusted. (Not you personally.)

(To be clear, not everything in those regimes was bad, but that's mostly because the preceding regimes were awful. And that was 90% due to those regimes being feudal, not capitalist. Plus it's hard, surely, to deny that China did much better when it switched from communist policies that killed off tens of millions of people, to a limited capitalism which improved almost everyone's lives. Gosh, maybe capitalism can be limited in some way???)

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.

Yes, absolutely. We may not agree on how much demarketization is needed, but we need more. And even in the big bad US we have socialization of, for instance, health care for the over-65, primary and secondary education, and in some areas other things, from water processing to liquor sales. People are starting to talk about UBIs, and actual experiments have gone very well. If the fash don't win, maybe in 20 or 50 years we'll have the idea that basic living, like basic healthcare, is a human right.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 4:01 pm [snip]

This.

I just remembered Yanis Varoufakis's idea of technofeudalism. Which is, very roughly: the tech elites have invented a new form of feudalism, monopoly control over commerce (Amazon) and social media (Facebook) which is not build on market mechanisms (and, for better or worse, its freedoms and ability to innovate) but on personal surveillance and algorithms. In this view we buy things not because we need them but because The Algorithm told us to.

Ironically, I think this point of view looked far more convincing a couple of years ago, before Musk destroyed Twitter and Facebook stumbled badly on VR. The techbros are one of our worst enemies— but then, they're also their own worst enemies. They can't keep themselves from the enshittification process, and it's hard to imagine that most of these companies will have the durability that, say, Sears Roebuck did.

"soviet union bad" this early? okay, soviet union bad. i'm not here advocating marxism as a solution (though China is not as capitalist as liberals often like to think: state-owned enterprises are something like half of the chinese economy, and literal direct party control over the remaining half is not trivial: I agree it's a model that works, but I'm not sure dengism is as simple as "let's do capitalism guys")

I agree that capitalism is better that what came before. what I'm saying is a much more limited point, and not even a very marxist one at that: that growth is not good: or, rather, more precisely, that growth is not necessarily good and, perhaps more importantly, that not all good is growth. like, sure, maybe statistically most growth is good (maybe? it does correlate with good things sometimes) but the same million dollars of increase in volume of currency units exchanged may be because we privatized air, because a new company found a new and more effective way to spam, or because we got however many people out of poverty. and, crucially, many things which are good would entail a dramatic shrink of the economy: abolish rent, for example, and line go down. we commies may be, as a whole, bad at distinguishing density, tech level and capitalism, but what I'm saying here is that liberals are, in turn, bad at distinguishing growth from good, which seems to be a bigger blindspot. for example, here:

I think "degrowth" is a kick in the balls to just about everyone in Africa, or Haiti, or Bolivia; they need more things, not less(...) it needs development, that is, growth.

Like... no? what africa, haiti or bolivia need (and tbh chile as well, median wages here are, I remind you, 500kusd with consumer prices for quotidian necessities higher than those in western europe: chile is a poor country, though yeah, thankfully not destitute) is concrete goods: food, housing, medicine, detergent, free time, socks, guitars. sometimes growth increases people's access to those things (with decently equitable economic development, a subset of growth, say post-soviet lithuania) but sometimes economic growth can reduce people's access to those things, as in early industrial revolution britain, or the economic growth that would result from privatizing air. or in enshittification. or the technofeudalism varoufakis predicts.

Like... it's easy to forget but... money is literally fake? and the way it functions is very, very, very complicated: it's under no obligation to represent economic development as we want it: more people having more access to more goods (surely that's the goal?) it can, yes, but it can also represent when you conquer a "primitive people" who weren't doing so bad and start collecting rent on the houses and lands they were peacefully occupying before, thus making them worse off, not better. And sure, nobody wants to be a subsistence farmer (actually, people do? the homesteading fandom has grown much), but then again... "primitives" had lives no shorter than medieval peasants, and with a lot more free time as well, shorter workdays, blabla: is this not also a good? a good that we condemn ourselves never to be able to account for or promote if we make line go up the goal?

And most people who peddle new, untried systems are not to be trusted. (Not you personally.)

fair enough (though distrusting the people defending the current status quo is also, I find, healthy) but eventually some new untried system is going to have to be tried. eventually if all we do is make line go up things will kind of go to shit, I think we agree on this. and yes, liberal democracy does have affordances for demarketization as a result of politics, but I guess I don't think they're going to be enough.

The techbros are one of our worst enemies— but then, they're also their own worst enemies. They can't keep themselves from the enshittification process, and it's hard to imagine that most of these companies will have the durability that, say, Sears Roebuck did.

then again, some techbros are fantastically successful at becoming Lord of The Thing We All Do For That. think bill gates, or larry ellison, or whoever owns adobe. there are some very stable principalities if we think of tech as renaissance italy.

Torco wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 7:39 pm "soviet union bad" this early? okay, soviet union bad. i'm not here advocating marxism as a solution (though China is not as capitalist as liberals often like to think: state-owned enterprises are something like half of the chinese economy, and literal direct party control over the remaining half is not trivial: I agree it's a model that works, but I'm not sure dengism is as simple as "let's do capitalism guys")

There's a lot to be said for Dengism-- including that it really was a radical break from Maoism. Much less good to say about Xi-ism.

growth is not good: or, rather, more precisely, that growth is not necessarily good and, perhaps more importantly, that not all good is growth.

Sure, OK, but maybe you could read past the first three words of my posts? I added a lot of stuff that amounts to "yes, of course not all growth is necessarily good."

I think "degrowth" is a kick in the balls to just about everyone in Africa, or Haiti, or Bolivia; they need more things, not less(...) it needs development, that is, growth.

Like... no? what africa, haiti or bolivia need (and tbh chile as well, median wages here are, I remind you, 500kusd with consumer prices for quotidian necessities higher than those in western europe: chile is a poor country, though yeah, thankfully not destitute) is concrete goods: food, housing, medicine, detergent, free time, socks, guitars.

So, you agree that they need more things, you just don't want to call it growth. That feels like some weird semantic game: "growth" is whatever you disapprove of.

economic growth can reduce people's access to those things, as in early industrial revolution britain

I think this is the paradox of modernism: at any one moment, things look terrible, and yet over a few hundred years things get way way less shitty. Unfortunately some of those terrible things get so much publicity that they distort judgments a century later.

So, people look at Dickens' novels, at the vivid descriptions of child labor or horrible schools, and (quite rightly) recoil. And then they look at, oh, Hobbiton in LOTR and pine for the pretty cottages and the loving relationship between Frodo and Samwise. And both pictures are highly misleading.

* Actual medieval farm life was thoroughly "nasty, brutish, and short", as one contemporary observer famously put it.
* No, homesteading is not like being an agricultural laborer.
* People flocked to the cities because factory jobs paid better.
* The middle class grew rapidly in 19C Britain and power democratized.
* Lords were really not like Aragorn and employers were not like Frodo.
* Child labor wasn't an invention of modern times. On the contrary, children spending their lives at play / in school is a modern invention.
* Women, in particular, got the worst of the Old Days: legal inferiority, death in childbirth, no civil rights, an infinity of domestic, machine-less drudgery.

There were horrible things, of course! Dickens and Marx were not wrong in pointing them out. But I'd just point out that liberty, equality, fraternity, or almost any other progressive ideals we have, are also parts of modernism. A few medieval authors would promote spiritual egalitarianism, but it had no practical fruits.

then again... "primitives" had lives no shorter than medieval peasants, and with a lot more free time as well, shorter workdays, blabla: is this not also a good?

Sure, and that's absolutely useless for the 8 billion people living on this planet. If your idea is "what if mega-genocide and then hunter-gathering again", count me out.

eventually some new untried system is going to have to be tried. eventually if all we do is make line go up things will kind of go to shit, I think we agree on this.

Certainly. The question is, how do we get there? I don't have a road map, but I do admire people who try something at a non-national scale, whether it's UBI or a corpo-sized co-op or non-centralized social media or finding out how to actually make people use bicycles or better leadership in a small country. (It's a lot easier to think of examples of that in the last few years than better leadership in a major country.)

then again, some techbros are fantastically successful at becoming Lord of The Thing We All Do For That. think bill gates, or larry ellison, or whoever owns adobe. there are some very stable principalities if we think of tech as renaissance italy.

I dunno, Microsoft doesn't even seem like the pinnacle of techbroism. Here's an interesting read on the company's ups and downs, focusing on the fact that over 10 years the author made a million theoretical dollars in stock options, lost that million dollars, and ended his employment with the stock price the same as when he started. Far from taking over everything, Microsoft basically lost the browser wars, lost the search wars, lost the phone wars, and is outcompeted by Linux at the server level. And Apple is slightly bigger.

Adobe is run by Shantanu Narayen. No, I didn't know either. I depend on their products, but it's not exactly owning our souls when we could switch to GIMP or Inkscape tomorrow.

Amazon is the really scary one.

Torco wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 7:39 pm

I think "degrowth" is a kick in the balls to just about everyone in Africa, or Haiti, or Bolivia; they need more things, not less(...) it needs development, that is, growth.

Like... no? what africa, haiti or bolivia need (and tbh chile as well, median wages here are, I remind you, 500kusd with consumer prices for quotidian necessities higher than those in western europe: chile is a poor country, though yeah, thankfully not destitute) is concrete goods: food, housing, medicine, detergent, free time, socks, guitars. sometimes growth increases people's access to those things (with decently equitable economic development, a subset of growth, say post-soviet lithuania) but sometimes economic growth can reduce people's access to those things, as in early industrial revolution britain, or the economic growth that would result from privatizing air. or in enshittification. or the technofeudalism varoufakis predicts.

Quite. Economic growth in the abstract does not necessarily benefit the average person. Specific products benefit people and economic growth can certainly make them more readily available. Undoubtedly the situation in places like Africa or Latin America differs substantially from America and I would hardly call for degrowth as a universal solution. If anything, I would call myself a growth skeptic rather than a dogmatic degrowth advocate.

Even so, infinite growth seems fundamentally incompatible with the inherent limitations of humanity. Aside from the well-known ecological issues of infinite growth, I worry that it will eventually demand more than humans can give. Already humans are struggling to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology which threatens to put millions out of work and destroy entire fields of employment. What happens when the economy has grown to the point where humans are not smart or strong enough to drive it further?

I think what Torco is getting at is that GDP measures monetary exchanges only, which makes it an unreliable indicator. This is a limitation economists are very aware of, btw. It's annoying though because pundits and politicians are not aware of that, or otherwise pretend not to be.

This can be a problem when you've got a huge public sector. Basically what they do is that they just total all public expense and add that to GDP. Which works after a fashion but is pretty crude and makes comparison with the private sector.

If we'd privatize our public health system and turned it over to private insurance companies, that would translate as economic growth (no matter how good or shitty private insurance would turn out)

Ares Land wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:01 am If we'd privatize our public health system and turned it over to private insurance companies, that would translate as economic growth (no matter how good or shitty private insurance would turn out)

Yeah, there's a paradox of efficiency there... when you really have better knowledge or systems, you can do things with less energy and less money.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 4:01 pmBut when you take that away, there are almost no actual models left, which means we're talking about a new, untried system. And most people who peddle new, untried systems are not to be trusted. (Not you personally.)

Problem is, basically all the systems that were tried did fail. The only system that kind of worked, for a while, for some people, was Trente Glorieuses-style social democracy (we can call it that even though often, it wasn't implemented by actual Social Democrats). And that only worked until the rich figured out that they could both 1) move production to poorer places and 2) spend a part of their money on vicious but effective political propaganda against social democracy and the kind of politicians likely to implement it.

So I don't see how we can move forward without trying some kind of new, untried system. Besides, all social and economic systems were untried once.

Re: the later discussions of whether growth should be taken as GDP growth, yeah, perhaps we should measure the size of the economy in terms of, say, things produced. But that would still lead us into the same dilemma I laid out in my opening post: With growth, you eventually run out of resources if you don't destroy the planet first; without growth, you eventually need austerity, and, as zompist said, can't really increase the standard of living of the world's poorest by much.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:58 am

Ares Land wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:01 am If we'd privatize our public health system and turned it over to private insurance companies, that would translate as economic growth (no matter how good or shitty private insurance would turn out)

Yeah, there's a paradox of efficiency there... when you really have better knowledge or systems, you can do things with less energy and less money.

That's true, but the problem I was thinking of is that GDP calculations for the public sector assume there is no value added -- they simply add up the running costs -- which makes comparison with private alternative misleading.

More generally, my impression is that degrowth activists focus on the way GDP (and by extension GDP growth) is inadequate and misleading as an indicator; politicians tend to rely on it far too much.
I have outlined my doubts but it is a proxy for something useful.

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 6:00 am Re: the later discussions of whether growth should be taken as GDP growth, yeah, perhaps we should measure the size of the economy in terms of, say, things produced. But that would still lead us into the same dilemma I laid out in my opening post: With growth, you eventually run out of resources if you don't destroy the planet first; without growth, you eventually need austerity, and, as zompist said, can't really increase the standard of living of the world's poorest by much.

That leaves out two possibilities:
The first is technological improvement -- a decent lifestyle doesn't have to destroy the planet, or use an inordinate amount of resources.
The second is wealth redistribution, plain and simple.

We need growth to improve the standard of living of the world's poorest... as for, say, Western Europe's poorest - I don't buy that the problem is that Western Europe doesn't produce enough.

Maybe the intriguing thing here is the very widespread assumption that both technological improvement and wealth redistribution are impossible. Technological improvement is not only possible but happening right now; as for wealth redistribution, this is not a complex problem: it's there as soon as people vote for it.

That's probably a rhetorical question. There are huge economic sectors that have no interest in technology improving (the oil industry, among others) and of course nobody above a certain wealth percentile wants redistribution, so of course the dominant view will be pessimistic or will focus on diversions (look! foreigners!)

Ares Land wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 6:08 am

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:58 am Yeah, there's a paradox of efficiency there... when you really have better knowledge or systems, you can do things with less energy and less money.

That's true, but the problem I was thinking of is that GDP calculations for the public sector assume there is no value added -- they simply add up the running costs -- which makes comparison with private alternative misleading.

More generally, my impression is that degrowth activists focus on the way GDP (and by extension GDP growth) is inadequate and misleading as an indicator; politicians tend to rely on it far too much.
I have outlined my doubts but it is a proxy for something useful.

I don't disagree. GDP is only a proxy for what we'd really like to measure, whether that's production or wealth or labor or prosperity or (with the first derivative) productivity. Any measurement can be gamed, or just focus attention wrongly. (There is some sort of political parable that could be written here. Like, a department head at a pin factory goes back to Adam Smith's pin manufacturing methods. Output goes down, but payroll goes way up! GDP rises!)

Not to defend the economists, but GDP is probably not bad as an aggregator for income, especially if you do obvious things like take it per capita, or look at the median not the mean, and correct for inflation, and better yet correct for PPP. And per capita income doesn't go up without productivity increases.

But yes, you get some misleading data. Probably the biggest is externalities: you can destroy the environment and it doesn't show up in GDP till too late.

I feel like I need to head off the "but capitaliiiissm" responses. Measurement is not a problem of capitalism, it's a problem for modern societies. You'd need numbers in a sociallist system too... and those numbers will also have paradoxes. I'd guarantee you that the USSR had no number that measured externalities: there was no environmental consciousness at all.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 3:51 pm I don't disagree. GDP is only a proxy for what we'd really like to measure, whether that's production or wealth or labor or prosperity or (with the first derivative) productivity. Any measurement can be gamed, or just focus attention wrongly. (There is some sort of political parable that could be written here. Like, a department head at a pin factory goes back to Adam Smith's pin manufacturing methods. Output goes down, but payroll goes way up! GDP rises!)

To bring up the obvious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

I added a lot of stuff that amounts to "yes, of course not all growth is necessarily good."

yeah but I feel as if you're saying that "i know growth and good is not the same" and then proceeding to use them as if they were synonimous anyway, as in the two examples I've cited. what people need is more access to goods, which may or may not be a thing growth can help with: the position of degrowthers is no, even if it may have in the past. considering the current tendency for enclosure of the conceptual commons, the rise of libertarians and fash, the lack of non capitalist societies whose stuff capitalists can conquer and then privatize, etcetera, this seems plausible. growth is not whatever I don't like, growth is a just a thing, like rain or, I don't know, football matches. things sometimes i like, and sometimes i don't like, because things can be good and also can be bad. we need economic development? for some definitions of economic development yes! more production of good things is, generally, good, but growth is not that.

incidentally
- actual medieval farmers worked much less than we do, and that's not nothing.
- people flocked to the cities, at least in part, because the commons their livelihoods depended on were marketized.
- the growth of that middle class coincided, and probably was caused by, the disappearance of middle classes outside britain, such as in india.

I don't think i've here taken an antimodernist position, just the position that line go up isn't the best metric, and that we should focus on goods, not growth. also that premodern systems had good things that we could try to recover. surely that's the idea, no? adopt good things regardless of whether they're growth or not?

Practical examples may help here, conworlding as they might be all politics is to some degree conworlding: housing. there is a paucity of affordable housing all over the world, and this can be chalked up to many reasons and causes and whatever but, hey, it's a reality. will more economic growth help with this? certainly not. wages are stagnant while rent goes up and this has gone on during periods of big growth. the GDP being bigger will not help, and probably just makes things worse since the piece of the currency pie that belongs to rich people grows more and more, thus making them be able to but more and more properties and rent them out, thus driving up prices -and rent- and thus making housing more affordable.

a degrowther might say that instead we could decomodify housing, ban or cap rent, or whatever, otherwise take steps to make housing more affordable. this necessarily means reducing the price of housing, which makes line go down. not really: fewer units of currency exchange hands, and the money that people save up doesn't necessarily go to the financial system to be exchanged a bazillion times a second thus making line go up big: it'll probably go to groceries, paint for the fence, dog food, you know, slow industries where those currency units will only be exchanged a few times a day at most. thus line go down. But making things cheaper is good, actually! but we can't, we need steady inflation, actually, for the system to work. Now of course under capitalism if we make line go down we're all fekked, cause access to goods goes down via collapse in investment, employment, blablabla and so we doom ourselves to neverending housing crisis. we can't solve this problem until we accept shrinkage as an acceptable outcome. we can't solve it if we keep to the notion that growth is good and necessary.

a degrowther might say something as outrageous as this: maybe we should try to do good things, instead of try to get line to go up? degrowth is not just about degrowth for its own sake, it's about allowing ourselves to do things that we can't otherwise do because of the preocuppation with growth, because of the dependence upon it we're in because the system we're using to organize society goes to shit if we don't make line go up. in a sentence, maybe fuck line. that doesn't mean the line is bad, that doesn't mean gulags or using the ciryllic alphabet, it doesn't mean becoming venezuela, it only means fuck line.

Re: the later discussions of whether growth should be taken as GDP growth, yeah, perhaps we should measure the size of the economy in terms of, say, things produced.

problem is the service sector eats up a fair bit, maybe most, of human labour these days.

but yes, measuring the economy is a complex matter, and politicians are horrible at it. In this I dare say think the soviets politicians, for all their evil bad bad evil bad (and the Chinese, who still come up with five years plans) are probably less wrong: gosplan had many goals, and used many different indicators to measure the economy: and they made tradeoffs all time time, fuck consumer goods cause we need more tanks, fuck computers we need more consumer goods. okay, not always the best choices. but still, they weren't half as focused on a single variable as neoliberal economists and politicians are.

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 6:42 pm I don't think i've here taken an antimodernist position, just the position that line go up isn't the best metric, and that we should focus on goods, not growth.

I feel like you're doing so much strawmanning and renaming that I don't know what you're saying, much less what nonsense you're attributing to me.

"Focus on goods, not growth"? What does that even mean? Do you think Joe Biden is sitting over a big machine labeled GROWTH and doing nothing but hoping that one number goes up? We all hate the "neoliberals" but what is the point of such caricatures?

also that premodern systems had good things that we could try to recover. surely that's the idea, no? adopt good things regardless of whether they're growth or not?

I don't quite get why you're baiting me about words beginning with G. I mean, yes, if you insist, like 99.99999% of the people of the world, I like goodness. And so what? I don't have to actually inform you, do I, that the better question is, what is goodness? Or do I need to point out that, like most human beings, I can value multiple things, not putting them on one scale?

Practical examples may help here, conworlding as they might be all politics is to some degree conworlding: housing. there is a paucity of affordable housing all over the world, and this can be chalked up to many reasons and causes and whatever but, hey, it's a reality. will more economic growth help with this? certainly not. wages are stagnant while rent goes up and this has gone on during periods of big growth. the GDP being bigger will not help, and probably just makes things worse since the piece of the currency pie that belongs to rich people grows more and more, thus making them be able to but more and more properties and rent them out, thus driving up prices -and rent- and thus making housing more affordable.

That's a terrible example, because the solution to housing is more housing. Rent caps do not create housing. Stealing rich people's houses does not create housing, though it would allow some redistribution. (I don't know what the situation is in Chile. In the US, it can be shown that building a tiny amount of housing doesn't help much. But there are other countries, e.g. Japan, which build a lot more houses and have cheaper housing prices.)

If your concern is with rich people, then jeez, say so, and I'll even agree with you. You can take a Picketty view that a hearty wealth tax will move us in the right direction. You can take a Jacobin line that guillotines should be involved. If you want to worry about a number, the GINI coefficient is a good one to focus on, but again, maybe we can hold more than one idea in our heads at once. Instead of just reducing inequality and staying miserable, maybe we could reduce inequality and reduce misery?

Just to be clear: we haven't been specific enough to even have a political disagreement. It feels to me that you're using "(de)growth" as a slogan: things you like are by definition not "growth" because that's something, I dunno, venture capitalists like. Making a world that's not about what plutocrats want is essential, but I think "degrowth" is a terrible, counter-productive label for that. Yes, we can make the world poorer and more miserable; that's generally what the other side wants, not what we should want.

malloc wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 9:56 pm Given the fundamentals of human psychology and physiology, not to mention time and space, there are limits on how much we can practically consume.

There are limits on how much we, individual retail customers, can practically consume. There are probably also theoretical limits on how much organized human endeavors can practically consume, but they're much higher - look up the Kardashev scale. How many machines for the manufacture of pencils do you own? Depending on your investment portfolio the answer may be greater than zero, but it's almost certainly less than one. Given that you don't own a machine for the manufacture of pencils, do you care whether or not there exist machines for the manufacture of pencils? Would you rather buy pencils from individual artisan pencilmakers at a price several orders of magnitude higher?

malloc wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 9:54 pm What happens when the economy has grown to the point where humans are not smart or strong enough to drive it further?

Great! Either we won't need to work or we'll have solved cost disease - ideally both. Assuming neither the machines nor the politicians kill us all first.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 6:54 am We need growth to improve the standard of living of the world's poorest... as for, say, Western Europe's poorest - I don't buy that the problem is that Western Europe doesn't produce enough.

Western Europe doesn't produce enough. Neither does the US. If energy is too cheap to meter, you can produce water by desalinization, synthesize carbon-neutral LNG from CO2 in the air, and grow tropical fruits in hydroponic greenhouses as far north as Alaska. It's nice to be able to eat strawberries in winter; it'd be nicer to be able to buy mangosteens, baels, and naranjillas for $3/lb or less at any grocery store anywhere in the world.

Torco wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 6:42 pm yeah but I feel as if you're saying that "i know growth and good is not the same" and then proceeding to use them as if they were synonimous anyway,

The key to your disagreement is that, at first approximation, they're not that far away. Recessions are pretty dreadful, high growth usually helps with unemployment. GDP growth correlates with rising standards of living, and so on.

That's because generally pin factories don't go back to Adam Smith methods, and businessmen don't go around and sell air. Yet. As I said before, I think the correlation growth = good worked so far but it might break down a little in the future. I think it's already started breaking down in at least some countries.

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 8:42 pm What does that even mean? Do you think Joe Biden is sitting over a big machine labeled GROWTH and doing nothing but hoping that one number goes up? We all hate the "neoliberals" but what is the point of such caricatures?

Man, I don't know about Joe Biden, but here we've had quite a few ministers that seemed to be doing just that

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 8:42 pm That's a terrible example, because the solution to housing is more housing. Rent caps do not create housing. Stealing rich people's houses does not create housing, though it would allow some redistribution. (I don't know what the situation is in Chile. In the US, it can be shown that building a tiny amount of housing doesn't help much. But there are other countries, e.g. Japan, which build a lot more houses and have cheaper housing prices.)

As things goes on, I'm less and less convinced that rent caps are somewhat bad for housing. The frankly, less complicated theory that landlords raise rent because they can increasingly strikes me as the better explanation.
I really don't know how things are in the US. Here in France, we don't really have a housing shortage; the housing crisis is plainly one of redistribution to the point that widespread regulation/socialization of the whole sector is starting to look attractive.

One relevant fact: housing was not really a problem in the mid-90s; rents and house prices could be high, granted, but well within the reach of the middle class. The French GDP is twice what is was in 1995 yet meeting a basic human need is a lot harder than it was back then. I think that's a hint that the GDP - development correlation has already broken down over here.

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 2:09 am Western Europe doesn't produce enough. Neither does the US. If energy is too cheap to meter, you can produce water by desalinization, synthesize carbon-neutral LNG from CO2 in the air, and grow tropical fruits in hydroponic greenhouses as far north as Alaska. It's nice to be able to eat strawberries in winter; it'd be nicer to be able to buy mangosteens, baels, and naranjillas for $3/lb or less at any grocery store anywhere in the world.

Would any of that help with poverty? I doubt it. Would it, in fact, really improve much standards of living? Would people be any happier?
We got enough tasteless hydroponic fruit as it is

Desalinization or synthesizing LNG are besides, inelegant, brute-force solutions to problems that could be fixed by not wasting in the first place.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:20 am As things goes on, I'm less and less convinced that rent caps are somewhat bad for housing. The frankly, less complicated theory that landlords raise rent because they can increasingly strikes me as the better explanation.
I really don't know how things are in the US. Here in France, we don't really have a housing shortage; the housing crisis is plainly one of redistribution to the point that widespread regulation/socialization of the whole sector is starting to look attractive.

Here, it depends on where you are. Chicago is not bad for housing. I just checked my town, Oak Park, and you have to go up to $450K to see many choices. On the other hand I could go to the less upscale suburb, literally across the street from Oak Park, and there are plenty of houses under $300K. Then I checked Quincy MA, where I used to live: you basically don't get anything liveable till $600K. None of these are big houses.

New York has the reputation of being impossible. You can't even get into Brooklyn for under $700K, and the houses you do find below $800K are comparable to the ones half that in Oak Park. You can get houses in the city for $300K, they'll just be in less desirable neighborhoods.

The problem in the US is that there just isn't much new housing built. For instance, the state of California built about 100,000 units (single or multi-family) in 2022. By contrast Japan, with 3 times the population, built 860,000. The newspapers actually worry about a "housing glut" in Japan.

Rent caps don't produce housing; they just create a sweet deal for longterm residents, and discourage new buildings.

All over, of course, the problem isn't so much "no housing" as "expensive housing in the places people really want to live." Naturally this is closely tied to transit and good schools-- also things that are locally decided and thus insanely badly distributed here.

Now I wonder: I live in a 70 m² apartment, shared with one flatmate. Assuming that I could still split rent evenly with one flatmate, how rich would I have to be in New York City to rent something like that?

Ares Land wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:20 am

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 8:42 pm What does that even mean? Do you think Joe Biden is sitting over a big machine labeled GROWTH and doing nothing but hoping that one number goes up? We all hate the "neoliberals" but what is the point of such caricatures?

Man, I don't know about Joe Biden, but here we've had quite a few ministers that seemed to be doing just that

For what's it's worth, the main economic number people pay attention to in Germany is probably the unemployment percentage, followed by the stock market indices. GDP-related numbers seem to be reported and talked about less than those.