To add to my comments yesterday, while GDP growth doesn’t seem to drive subjective well-being (SWB) in Western countries, recessions certainly harm it. You acknowledged unemployment could be an issue. I don’t know if shifting to a four day workweek is a good idea to generate extra jobs because (1) it’s authoritarian to stop people from working five days a week if they want to (2) people will suffer a real loss of 20% of their income and they may suffer in SWB terms as a result (3) many jobs are not super fungible and 4 workers doing 5 days a week can’t simply be replaced by 5 workers doing four days a week without a lot of retraining (4) slowing down parts of the economy unconnected to carbon emissions will lower output unnecessarily (as an example, if you cut teacher hours by 20%, it isn’t clear how this meaningfully reduces carbon emissions because teaching isn’t a high carbon occupation, but you will suddenly have to higher an extra 25% more teachers if you want to keep total teaching hours the same) and (5) while GDP growth doesn’t raise SWB, GDP declines could still lower it. Humans are loss averse, and tend to want to avoid losses more than they want to approach equivalent gains, by a ratio of about 2:1.
It does seem like good public policy partially protects against the SWB impacts of unemployment and recessions (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42413-019-00022-0). However, (1) that doesn’t mean it’s entirely protected and (2) we can’t snap our fingers to get better public policy—that’ll take work.
Yeah, recessions tend harm SWB, but I don’t see why a planned degrowth as I picture it would: e.g., if people work less, they’d earn less, but if we have UBI and more welfare, we may end up having more in the end. Reg #3&4: decreasing working hours would be costly (e.g., retraining). But if we’re to consume less, we’d produce less, so there’d be less jobs available, so we can redistribute working hours. In reference to #1, it should ofc not be made in an authoritarian way, but I think there should be other ways, and less working hours should be related to more job satisfaction/more SWB.
To add to my comments yesterday, while GDP growth doesn’t seem to drive subjective well-being (SWB) in Western countries, recessions certainly harm it. You acknowledged unemployment could be an issue. I don’t know if shifting to a four day workweek is a good idea to generate extra jobs because (1) it’s authoritarian to stop people from working five days a week if they want to (2) people will suffer a real loss of 20% of their income and they may suffer in SWB terms as a result (3) many jobs are not super fungible and 4 workers doing 5 days a week can’t simply be replaced by 5 workers doing four days a week without a lot of retraining (4) slowing down parts of the economy unconnected to carbon emissions will lower output unnecessarily (as an example, if you cut teacher hours by 20%, it isn’t clear how this meaningfully reduces carbon emissions because teaching isn’t a high carbon occupation, but you will suddenly have to higher an extra 25% more teachers if you want to keep total teaching hours the same) and (5) while GDP growth doesn’t raise SWB, GDP declines could still lower it. Humans are loss averse, and tend to want to avoid losses more than they want to approach equivalent gains, by a ratio of about 2:1.
It does seem like good public policy partially protects against the SWB impacts of unemployment and recessions (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42413-019-00022-0). However, (1) that doesn’t mean it’s entirely protected and (2) we can’t snap our fingers to get better public policy—that’ll take work.
Yeah, recessions tend harm SWB, but I don’t see why a planned degrowth as I picture it would: e.g., if people work less, they’d earn less, but if we have UBI and more welfare, we may end up having more in the end.
Reg #3&4: decreasing working hours would be costly (e.g., retraining). But if we’re to consume less, we’d produce less, so there’d be less jobs available, so we can redistribute working hours. In reference to #1, it should ofc not be made in an authoritarian way, but I think there should be other ways, and less working hours should be related to more job satisfaction/more SWB.