Director of Partnerships and Field Operations for the Maternal Health Initiative (https://maternalhealthinitiative.org), a global health charity training healthcare workers in lower-income contexts on family planning counseling.
I co-founded MHI in September 2022 out of the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Programme.
Prior to that, I founded Effective Self-Help (https://effectiveselfhelp.org) a research organisation studying the most effective ways people can improve their wellbeing and productivity.
I appreciate the detailed write-up but felt that this lacked a fair attempt to present the strongest arguments in favour of degrowth and then critique them (steelmanning).
It’s been a few years since I studied degrowth in my undergrad degree so my understanding may be weak/ rusty/ simply wrong. All the same, my impression is that a pro-growth attitude is the majority opinion in EA which makes a fair presentation of the alternative argument particularly important as many readers may be predisposed to agree with you.
I’m not an advocate for degrowth (more just have some sympathy for some its general principles but uncertain they can be applied very well) so other people can likely present a better case in its favour. Samuel’s comment goes into more detail than I intend to but to highlight a few points that stuck out for me:
1) I don’t think reducing population is a universal, or even dominant, objective amongst people who support degrowth. e.g. this blog post which discusses the topic and highlights that population reduction is unnecessary given the majority of emissions come from a minority of people.
2) It seems pretty clear that rich people produce a lot more emissions—e.g. reports like this or this highlighting huge disparity in emissions between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% globally.
3) It’s quite possible capitalism has led to people working more, not less. While a chart like this shows a decline in working hours since the end of the Industrial Revolution, it’s quite plausible people worked far less before the Industrial Revolution—e.g. here
I think it’s great to see engagement with ideas like degrowth on the Forum and appreciate anyone’s efforts to write up a more significant argument for what they think and then publish it, I would just encourage a more thorough engagement with the argument you’re critiquing in a post like this.