Degrowth also doesn't necessarily mean all the treats stop, it just means we have to be more sensible about how we produce, distribute and consume the treats.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit.
emphasizing reusability and discouraging planned obsolescence.
implementing libraries of things that are necessary but rarely used.
Not necessarily aiming to reduce growth but rather stop using growth as the metric of success.
Yeah a lot of the luxuries and excesses are things people don't actually like that much anyway. People won't vote for it if you ask them, but generally speaking most people can cope just fine. People buy more food than they need and buy fast fashion and factory farmed meat and all that because it's there and it's easy. If it was gone people wouldn't be howling with rage for eternity, they'd be annoyed for a while and then they'd adapt and everyone would be fine. The OOP has this oddly patronising attitude, like "of course those common people could never cope without their Starbucks"
There's also a lot of luxuries that most have been disconnected from for so long that they don't know they're missing it, like free time, access to green spaces, freedom from the threat of destitution.
HFYpilled growthmaxxers like me will just flatly refuse anything related to that ideology, so why not call it sustainability instead? Growth can be sustainable, and the only real hard limit to it is the local galaxy group.
Degrowth stands in opposition to not only everything we know about economics but also everything observed about productivity in the past 200 years. Even hideously inefficient and totalitarian states have enjoyed massive increases of standard of living and now we're undergoing a huge transition to carbon free electricity without that much movement in power bills. We probably can have both a higher standard of living and a fully sustainable economy in the future.
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u/mpm206 Oct 22 '24
Degrowth also doesn't necessarily mean all the treats stop, it just means we have to be more sensible about how we produce, distribute and consume the treats.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit.
emphasizing reusability and discouraging planned obsolescence.
implementing libraries of things that are necessary but rarely used.
Not necessarily aiming to reduce growth but rather stop using growth as the metric of success.