ok, see my comment below on covid and degrowth. It is difficult to see how we could reach a sustainable state via degrowth without shrinking the population by several billion and by reducing everyone’s living standards to pre-industrial levels, i.e. most people living on <$2 per day.
If you (or someone else) wants to defend degrowth on the Forum, it would probably be more useful to actually make degrowth arguments, rather than linking to a polemic that isn’t even trying to make an objective assessment.
I’m not sure that there are any attempted-objective assessments of degrowth (at least, not that I’ve found) and the post I linked provides an overview of the topic as understood by most of its key proponents. If I wanted to introduce people to EA, would it be inappropriate to offer them a copy of Doing Good Better?
I didn’t make specific arguments because frankly I shouldn’t need to. Someone who has written about climate change should not be making unequivocally untrue statements about basic aspects of a core strand of environmental economics. My assumption was that, given Halstead’s experience, his mischaracterizations could not have been due to a lack of knowledge.
This will probably be dogpiled due to “tone” but to be honest I have rewritten this comment twice to move away from clear statements of my views towards more EA-friendly language to make it as charitable as possible. There just aren’t many nice ways of saying that, well...
I agree that I don’t see anything wrong with linking to that paper.
I do think my view is quite defensible. eg in the discussion of degrowth below, the author says “We could very plausibly stop or at least delay climate change by drastically reducing the use of technology right now (COVID bought us a few months just by shutting down planes although that has “recovered” now )” the experience of the massive global humanitarian and economic disaster of covid seems like a very poor advert for a position ‘we can make degrowth work if only we try’. it’s killed 15 million people and hundreds of millions of people have been locked indoors for months.
I really don’t see the link between reducing air travel and the fact that COVID killed millions of people and necessitated lockdown measures.
I’m going to disengage now. Repeatedly mischaracterizing opposing views and deploying non-sequiturs for rhetorical reasons do not indicate to me that this will be a productive conversation.
ok, see my comment below on covid and degrowth. It is difficult to see how we could reach a sustainable state via degrowth without shrinking the population by several billion and by reducing everyone’s living standards to pre-industrial levels, i.e. most people living on <$2 per day.
It seems that you fundamentally misunderstand degrowth. For an introduction I suggest this:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-102017-025941
If you (or someone else) wants to defend degrowth on the Forum, it would probably be more useful to actually make degrowth arguments, rather than linking to a polemic that isn’t even trying to make an objective assessment.
I’m not sure that there are any attempted-objective assessments of degrowth (at least, not that I’ve found) and the post I linked provides an overview of the topic as understood by most of its key proponents. If I wanted to introduce people to EA, would it be inappropriate to offer them a copy of Doing Good Better?
I didn’t make specific arguments because frankly I shouldn’t need to. Someone who has written about climate change should not be making unequivocally untrue statements about basic aspects of a core strand of environmental economics. My assumption was that, given Halstead’s experience, his mischaracterizations could not have been due to a lack of knowledge.
This will probably be dogpiled due to “tone” but to be honest I have rewritten this comment twice to move away from clear statements of my views towards more EA-friendly language to make it as charitable as possible. There just aren’t many nice ways of saying that, well...
you see the problem?
I agree that I don’t see anything wrong with linking to that paper.
I do think my view is quite defensible. eg in the discussion of degrowth below, the author says “We could very plausibly stop or at least delay climate change by drastically reducing the use of technology right now (COVID bought us a few months just by shutting down planes although that has “recovered” now )” the experience of the massive global humanitarian and economic disaster of covid seems like a very poor advert for a position ‘we can make degrowth work if only we try’. it’s killed 15 million people and hundreds of millions of people have been locked indoors for months.
I really don’t see the link between reducing air travel and the fact that COVID killed millions of people and necessitated lockdown measures.
I’m going to disengage now. Repeatedly mischaracterizing opposing views and deploying non-sequiturs for rhetorical reasons do not indicate to me that this will be a productive conversation.