In the spirit of collaboration, might I just add a few that came to mind. They may have occurred to you and simply not met your criteria.
Ecocide and ecological destruction is a broader issue than climate change. Perhaps, that is the worst of the bunch, but I believe that industrial scale destruction of land, air, and water is noteworthy. Look at eg. ocean acidification, poisoned water shelves, soil erosion, bio-accumulation of forever chemicals. I find that EA can be kind of a contrarian space such that when ecological issues are brought up it is mostly to emphasize how little we care, but these are public goods we all rely on and the piper will demand a certain level of payment.
Also, people should work less. They should have better conditions. A significant fraction of the world does back breaking work for shit money and thatâs not utopian. A bunch of the work is pretty much pointless anyways, itâs just that the workers lives arenât considered worthwhile because they are poor.
People should live longer lives and have less disease.
People should have more friends and better communities. A lot of people smoke cigarettes and scroll Facebook and theyâd probably rather do something better in a more perfect world.
There should be less war.
Also, a few points where I at least superficially disagree with you:
âgrowthâ as such is not an obvious target to me. I feel there is a bit of slight of hand here where what people mean to say is âit is good when more good stuff happensâ and what they end up saying is âit is good when commerce of any kind happensâ. You actually approach some of the most significant aspects of this critique in your critique of slave cotton and cruel farms, so I suspect weâre not as far apart on this as we could be.
GDP for example often comes up as the implied metric of âeconomic growthâ and I would argue that it actually includes a lot of bad things as well. Doing evil commerce is bad. Enclosing previously non-economic spheres of life such that they are now added to the index is bad. All manner of environmental destruction and poisoning the commons are bad and the long term negative impacts are not suitably captured by this index. Working people into pain and despair is bad. And depending on what is actually being produced, elements of this index can also just be irrelevant or unnecessary for the further increase of human living standards.
It feels like a case of âgraph madnessâ to simplify the whole world into just âmore stuffâ being produced and to be a complete nihilist about what that stuff actually is. Certainly, some forms of production are more or less essential to human well being. I would argue thereâs not much reason to think that this index captures all of that nuance even under relatively favorable âgraph worldâ assumptions. In the real world, especially given youâve already shown a commendable willingness to differentiate between âwho has wealth right nowâ and âmoralityâ, it seems even less likely that GDP would have much to say in the face of these obstacles.
I would argue that these problems are so deep that it is not even productive as short hand to say that it is good in terms of human well being when GDP goes up. I found your explanation really appealingly parsimonious and Iâm not being facetious when I say it resonated more than most cases for growth.
âEconomic growth means increasing the amount of goods that a society produces. This increases how resources people have, which increases their quality of life.â
But I would invite you to maybe interrogate:
If that is what growth means, a lot of economic activity is bullshit. Environmentally harmful activities could easily leave us with less. If we are doing commerce instead of something else, the pie might not have grown at all so much as become commercialized.
Even if the pie did get bigger, rising tides need not lift all ships. Consider the case of eg. wages stagnation, cost of living rises, and investors hoovering up all of the actual profit being made; arguably kind of the default case. I would argue it is in general quite relevant who is materially benefiting from commerce/âindustry and âgrowing the pieâ is just a bulwark against this kind of analysis. Real, âdonât look behind the curtainâ shit.
There are a lot of things other than commerce that make life worth living. If I work more and spend more, thatâs more commerce, but I would often enjoy my life less.
Thatâs just a cursory sketch of a critique of growth. I hope you kind of see what Iâm getting at and why âgrowthâ per say might not be exactly worth aiming for in its own right.
To be really honest, I would go as far as to say the idea of âgrowthâ /â GDP as the one true economic index is often employed as sort of just a cynical âpro-wealthy peopleâ talking point. There are certainly true believers, but also it has received a lot financial funding and laundered prestige it doesnât deserve. In my humble opinion, thatâs sort of a recurring problem within the ~âscienceâ of economics; loads of âNobelâ Prize winning economists have said things to that effect. Would you believe it, according to the kingâs top wealth scientist, itâs actually really good that the king is wealthy lol. I critique because I love; my undergrad minor was econ and I am a serial econ book enjoyer, but I also read books about con artists lol.
Slavery never ended in the United States. Chattel slavery did, but forced work of men in chains under threat of violence and torture happens every day until we stop it.
Sometimes they pay them shit money, <$1 a day, but not always. Personally, I donât really see why they bother except so that it can be brought up in conversations like this. Itâs an obviously insulting amount of money and there is no pretext of consent. I guess itâs the same logic as growth in a way, âcommerce washes all sinsâ. The real reason the convicts work is to avoid being assaulted by the guards and/âor thrown into solitary.
The 13th amendment explicitly allows this and under US jurisprudence this is justified as a legal form of slavery. In the end, the civil war just sort of nationalized the slave trade and changed how it operates a bit. They still pick cotton and everything.
Not that it matters, but 90%+ of these people arenât even alleged to have done anything violent. And they sure ainât white collar crimes either lol. For whatever reason, people mostly donât care about slavery as long as itâs happening to the right people I guess. I think most people donât really know because a prison is the perfect place to hide a bunch of people in chains and you get taught in school that slavery is over. They do work for the federal government and also private corporations like Walmart and McDonaldâs [https://ââapnews.com/ââarticle/ââprison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e].
You already touched on prison reform, so forgive me for preaching to the converted.
Hey, good list fellow traveler.
In the spirit of collaboration, might I just add a few that came to mind. They may have occurred to you and simply not met your criteria.
Ecocide and ecological destruction is a broader issue than climate change. Perhaps, that is the worst of the bunch, but I believe that industrial scale destruction of land, air, and water is noteworthy. Look at eg. ocean acidification, poisoned water shelves, soil erosion, bio-accumulation of forever chemicals. I find that EA can be kind of a contrarian space such that when ecological issues are brought up it is mostly to emphasize how little we care, but these are public goods we all rely on and the piper will demand a certain level of payment.
Also, people should work less. They should have better conditions. A significant fraction of the world does back breaking work for shit money and thatâs not utopian. A bunch of the work is pretty much pointless anyways, itâs just that the workers lives arenât considered worthwhile because they are poor.
People should live longer lives and have less disease.
People should have more friends and better communities. A lot of people smoke cigarettes and scroll Facebook and theyâd probably rather do something better in a more perfect world.
There should be less war.
Also, a few points where I at least superficially disagree with you:
âgrowthâ as such is not an obvious target to me. I feel there is a bit of slight of hand here where what people mean to say is âit is good when more good stuff happensâ and what they end up saying is âit is good when commerce of any kind happensâ. You actually approach some of the most significant aspects of this critique in your critique of slave cotton and cruel farms, so I suspect weâre not as far apart on this as we could be.
GDP for example often comes up as the implied metric of âeconomic growthâ and I would argue that it actually includes a lot of bad things as well. Doing evil commerce is bad. Enclosing previously non-economic spheres of life such that they are now added to the index is bad. All manner of environmental destruction and poisoning the commons are bad and the long term negative impacts are not suitably captured by this index. Working people into pain and despair is bad. And depending on what is actually being produced, elements of this index can also just be irrelevant or unnecessary for the further increase of human living standards.
It feels like a case of âgraph madnessâ to simplify the whole world into just âmore stuffâ being produced and to be a complete nihilist about what that stuff actually is. Certainly, some forms of production are more or less essential to human well being. I would argue thereâs not much reason to think that this index captures all of that nuance even under relatively favorable âgraph worldâ assumptions. In the real world, especially given youâve already shown a commendable willingness to differentiate between âwho has wealth right nowâ and âmoralityâ, it seems even less likely that GDP would have much to say in the face of these obstacles.
I would argue that these problems are so deep that it is not even productive as short hand to say that it is good in terms of human well being when GDP goes up. I found your explanation really appealingly parsimonious and Iâm not being facetious when I say it resonated more than most cases for growth.
âEconomic growth means increasing the amount of goods that a society produces. This increases how resources people have, which increases their quality of life.â
But I would invite you to maybe interrogate:
If that is what growth means, a lot of economic activity is bullshit. Environmentally harmful activities could easily leave us with less. If we are doing commerce instead of something else, the pie might not have grown at all so much as become commercialized.
Even if the pie did get bigger, rising tides need not lift all ships. Consider the case of eg. wages stagnation, cost of living rises, and investors hoovering up all of the actual profit being made; arguably kind of the default case. I would argue it is in general quite relevant who is materially benefiting from commerce/âindustry and âgrowing the pieâ is just a bulwark against this kind of analysis. Real, âdonât look behind the curtainâ shit.
There are a lot of things other than commerce that make life worth living. If I work more and spend more, thatâs more commerce, but I would often enjoy my life less.
Thatâs just a cursory sketch of a critique of growth. I hope you kind of see what Iâm getting at and why âgrowthâ per say might not be exactly worth aiming for in its own right.
To be really honest, I would go as far as to say the idea of âgrowthâ /â GDP as the one true economic index is often employed as sort of just a cynical âpro-wealthy peopleâ talking point. There are certainly true believers, but also it has received a lot financial funding and laundered prestige it doesnât deserve. In my humble opinion, thatâs sort of a recurring problem within the ~âscienceâ of economics; loads of âNobelâ Prize winning economists have said things to that effect. Would you believe it, according to the kingâs top wealth scientist, itâs actually really good that the king is wealthy lol. I critique because I love; my undergrad minor was econ and I am a serial econ book enjoyer, but I also read books about con artists lol.
Slavery never ended in the United States. Chattel slavery did, but forced work of men in chains under threat of violence and torture happens every day until we stop it.
Sometimes they pay them shit money, <$1 a day, but not always. Personally, I donât really see why they bother except so that it can be brought up in conversations like this. Itâs an obviously insulting amount of money and there is no pretext of consent. I guess itâs the same logic as growth in a way, âcommerce washes all sinsâ. The real reason the convicts work is to avoid being assaulted by the guards and/âor thrown into solitary.
The 13th amendment explicitly allows this and under US jurisprudence this is justified as a legal form of slavery. In the end, the civil war just sort of nationalized the slave trade and changed how it operates a bit. They still pick cotton and everything.
Not that it matters, but 90%+ of these people arenât even alleged to have done anything violent. And they sure ainât white collar crimes either lol. For whatever reason, people mostly donât care about slavery as long as itâs happening to the right people I guess. I think most people donât really know because a prison is the perfect place to hide a bunch of people in chains and you get taught in school that slavery is over. They do work for the federal government and also private corporations like Walmart and McDonaldâs [https://ââapnews.com/ââarticle/ââprison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e].
You already touched on prison reform, so forgive me for preaching to the converted.
Solid list! Good to have you as an accomplice!