First, I started the research back in ~2017. I’m not writing from a position of total ignorance here.
Look, there are some times where a tough situation means that the rational choice is to accept hardship in order to avoid a worse outcome. Covid is a good example: isolation/“lockdown” measures made sense at least in the early part of the pandemic, despite the hit to the economy and to people’s lives.
But (to continue the analogy) the harm to human life from permanent lockdown would be so vast that it doesn’t make sense to entertain until you’ve tried everything else. If in ~Q2 of 2020 someone had proposed a forever-lockdown as the new normal, what would your reaction be? Mine would be: wait, what about the vaccines that are in development? What about the possibility of finding a cure? If nothing else, could we develop cheap rapid testing? Etc. Perma-lockdown would essentially be giving up and admitting defeat—accepting a permanently reduced quality of life, because we just weren’t smart or competent enough to come up with an actual solution to the problem and move forward.
That’s how I see “degrowth.” Like, let’s accept for the sake of argument that degrowth would provide temporary relief for certain problems. Maybe you could even make an argument that it’s needed as some stopgap measure, analogous to lockdowns (although I’m skeptical). But the degrowth movement wants to end growth as a permanent measure in response to environmental problems. The missed opportunity to make life better for everyone is so mind-bogglingly vast that it requires extreme justification—there really has to be no other way. And the degrowth movement is extremely far from providing that justification.
First, I started the research back in ~2017. I’m not writing from a position of total ignorance here.
Look, there are some times where a tough situation means that the rational choice is to accept hardship in order to avoid a worse outcome. Covid is a good example: isolation/“lockdown” measures made sense at least in the early part of the pandemic, despite the hit to the economy and to people’s lives.
But (to continue the analogy) the harm to human life from permanent lockdown would be so vast that it doesn’t make sense to entertain until you’ve tried everything else. If in ~Q2 of 2020 someone had proposed a forever-lockdown as the new normal, what would your reaction be? Mine would be: wait, what about the vaccines that are in development? What about the possibility of finding a cure? If nothing else, could we develop cheap rapid testing? Etc. Perma-lockdown would essentially be giving up and admitting defeat—accepting a permanently reduced quality of life, because we just weren’t smart or competent enough to come up with an actual solution to the problem and move forward.
That’s how I see “degrowth.” Like, let’s accept for the sake of argument that degrowth would provide temporary relief for certain problems. Maybe you could even make an argument that it’s needed as some stopgap measure, analogous to lockdowns (although I’m skeptical). But the degrowth movement wants to end growth as a permanent measure in response to environmental problems. The missed opportunity to make life better for everyone is so mind-bogglingly vast that it requires extreme justification—there really has to be no other way. And the degrowth movement is extremely far from providing that justification.