Some choice quotes from new Lancet study on #degrowth or #PostGrowth and planetary health:

"Doughnut, wellbeing, and steady-state economics generally position their proposals within the current capitalist system, whereas degrowth is critical of the possibilities of an egalitarian slowdown within capitalism given that capitalist competition is structurally geared towards growth. Degrowth therefore emphasises the need for a planned, democratic transformation of the economic system to drastically reduce ecological impact and inequality and improve wellbeing. Degrowth, similarly to steady-state economics, regards a lower GDP as a probable outcome of efforts to substantially reduce resource use. Reducing GDP is not a goal of these approaches, however, but, it is seen as something that economies need to be made resilient to. The Doughnut and wellbeing approaches are more agnostic about GDP growth, but still view it as a poor measure of progress. Post-growth is plural and open to all these perspectives. All approaches converge on the need for qualitative improvement without relying on quantitative growth, and on selectively decreasing the production of less necessary and more damaging goods and services, while increasing beneficial ones."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

Revisiting "Limits To Growth" on its 50th anniversary:

"Scientists have also sought to assess the validity of the Limits to Growth model by looking at how well it fits historical trends since its publication. Previous studies have explored how the various runs of the Limits to Growth model compare with actual trends and suggest that the world is most closely tracking the Double Resources scenario, which differs from the Standard Run in its assumption that the initial stock of non-renewable resources is twice as large as the Standard Run resource stock (figure 1). In this scenario, collapse occurs later and is driven not by scarcity of non-renewable resources (ie, a source limit), as in the Standard Run, but by persistent pollution and its impact on ecosystem stability (ie, a sink limit, otherwise known as a regenerative capacity limit)."

#DeGrowth #LimitsToGrowth

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

fuck William Nordhaus

"Decoupling"? It's possible but extremely unlikely (authors being politic here); "the post-growth field suggests taking a precautionary approach, given the historical record and the rapid narrowing of the window to prevent ecological breakdown. Post-growth, it should be emphasised, does not state that decoupling economic activity from emissions and getting to net zero emissions is impossible, just that it is made harder by economic growth. For energy and material use, which can only be reduced and never brought to zero, the necessary reductions are easier to achieve with post-growth."

#DeGrowth #PostGrowth #Decoupling

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

On human wellbeing vs GDP:

"The social limits hypothesis holds that there is a limit to the extent that growth improves subjective wellbeing, because humans adapt to higher levels of income, and compare themselves to others who are also getting richer, or because additional production goes towards zero-sum status goods. The social cost hypothesis is that above a certain level of GDP, the costs of growth (eg, congestion, pollution, mental health, social upheaval) might offset its wellbeing benefits.90 Growth is said to become uneconomic."

#DeGrowth #GDP #Capitalism

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

But isn't lack of growth destabilizing?

"Economic research has shown that the desired (or optimal) rate of consumption growth might decline to close to zero if (environmental) risks associated with new technologies and people's preferences for safety are taken into account. From a post-growth perspective, the problem then is not that growth might be coming to an end, but rather that, given that economic and political systems are dependent on growth for their stability, stagnation under capitalism poses substantial risks to institutional stability. How to prosper without growth therefore becomes a crucial question."

#DeGrowth #capitalism

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

Continuing to read the new Lancet study on degrowth/post-growth ideas!

They have a table listing post-growth oriented policies, their good points, and the critiques against them.

-Universal basic income
-work time reduction
-universal basic services
-job guarantee
-maximum income
-wealth tax
-public money
-replacing GDP
-cap and adapt
-green new deal
-carbon taxes or dividends

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showFullTableHTML?isHtml=true&tableId=tbl1&pii=S2542-5196%2824%2900310-3

#Degrowth

Growth as a goal for societies is basically brand new.

"Historians and social scientists have sought to explain the origins of the political hegemony of growth: the dominance of the pursuit of GDP growth as a political objective. Growth might not be an economic imperative in the abstract, this literature suggests, but rather a political imperative, locked in by power relations, institutions, and accounting systems geared towards its pursuit. The contemporary preoccupation with GDP first emerged as a response to the need of governments to manage economic production during the Great Depression and the Second World War, whereas growth-targeting became entrenched during the Cold War, linked to the arms race between the two blocs. An iterative process between accounting and targeting, and the institutions geared towards the measurement and pursuit of GDP, gradually made growth appear as a natural and unquestionable objective. But the success of growth, as a political objective, stems from its function, which was to appease and deflect distributional conflict, becoming a core factor of state legitimacy and political stability."

Btw basically every sentence in this has citations, in case you want to read MORE. I'm taking the citation numbers out to make for easier reading.

#Degrowth #history #WWII #ColdWar #Growth #EconomicGrowth @histodons

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

"You just want everyone to be poor and miserable!" is what capitalism apologists say (with zero sense of irony). Nope, they're either uninformed or lying--and I seriously urge you to go with "lying" as the default, in order to reduce the potential for mischief by bad actors.

"Empirical research points therefore to an important conundrum. On the one hand, high-income countries achieve high levels of human wellbeing but significantly overshoot their fair share of planetary boundaries. The level of resource use of these high-income countries cannot be universalised. On the other hand, despite a decline in the amount of energy required to achieve human development goals, modelling decent living standards for all within planetary boundaries shows that, under existing conditions, there is very little room for excess or for inequality.
This research has led to a shift of attention towards alternative provisioning systems and the types of distributional dynamics that could radically change current relationships between resource use and human wellbeing... A recent review of industrial transformation models and scenarios found that combined supply-side and demand-side measures could reduce current economy-wide material use by 56%, energy use by 40–60%, and greenhouse gas emissions by 70% to net zero."

#degrowth #equality

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext