I’ve never heard of anyone proposing 85% wealth reduction so I don’t think it’s relevant here. But you could absolutely take that wealth and use it to create good standards of living across the board within sustainable limits. That’s what everyone wants at the end of the day, right?
I don’t know anything about degrowth people saying we cannot use new technologies even if they don’t cause damage to the environment. That sounds more like straight up primitivism, which is a really obscure ideology. I think you’re better off responding to the strongest possible arguments rather than the weakest ones. That seems like the most effective way to come to the best proposals using insights from both sides.
It seems like you don’t accept the possibility to have innovation within an economy and rising standards of living without increasing total resource extraction every year. Maybe people figure out asteroid mining and all kinds of innovations so we never have to worry about any resources but it seems possible that such technology could take a long time or never be invented. Instead you turn to “Well this seems politically hard not easy and effective” and again if we end up in a world where it’s what we needed to do, then we should have done it and tried to do it no matter how hard it was. CFCs were an example of banning harmful technology instead of an innovation only approach. You say it was easier because growth continued but you don’t have a counterfactual to judge it against. Maybe it’s more palatable to not change any tax rates and investment policies and just keep raising more revenue as the economy grows, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to invest in beneficial technologies.
People cut down a whole forest for profit today because they are shortsighted and don’t care or they don’t have other alternatives. For some people, interest rates will never change that unless you paid them more than what they could chop the whole forest down for today. They are that shortsighted and selfish. And if you’re doing that to save the Amazon, well that also seems like a big policy change very different than just invest, grow, and hope for the best. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have growth in parts of the world that need it while reducing overconsumption in other parts.
I’ve never heard of anyone proposing 85% wealth reduction so I don’t think it’s relevant here. But you could absolutely take that wealth and use it to create good standards of living across the board within sustainable limits. That’s what everyone wants at the end of the day, right?
I don’t know anything about degrowth people saying we cannot use new technologies even if they don’t cause damage to the environment. That sounds more like straight up primitivism, which is a really obscure ideology. I think you’re better off responding to the strongest possible arguments rather than the weakest ones. That seems like the most effective way to come to the best proposals using insights from both sides.
It seems like you don’t accept the possibility to have innovation within an economy and rising standards of living without increasing total resource extraction every year. Maybe people figure out asteroid mining and all kinds of innovations so we never have to worry about any resources but it seems possible that such technology could take a long time or never be invented. Instead you turn to “Well this seems politically hard not easy and effective” and again if we end up in a world where it’s what we needed to do, then we should have done it and tried to do it no matter how hard it was. CFCs were an example of banning harmful technology instead of an innovation only approach. You say it was easier because growth continued but you don’t have a counterfactual to judge it against. Maybe it’s more palatable to not change any tax rates and investment policies and just keep raising more revenue as the economy grows, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to invest in beneficial technologies.
People cut down a whole forest for profit today because they are shortsighted and don’t care or they don’t have other alternatives. For some people, interest rates will never change that unless you paid them more than what they could chop the whole forest down for today. They are that shortsighted and selfish. And if you’re doing that to save the Amazon, well that also seems like a big policy change very different than just invest, grow, and hope for the best. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have growth in parts of the world that need it while reducing overconsumption in other parts.