If you don’t have any precise vision yet, how can you be sure that degrowth is not the best option, or at least a good enough one? I’m 100% behind “We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. [...] One that acknowledges the problems of progress, confronts them directly, and offers solutions.” But when you continue with “And one that holds up a positive vision of the future.”, it seems to me that you’ve written the conclusion before starting the research.
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.
IMO there’s a big difference between “obviously material progress is good” and “obviously some progress is good”—it could be that after a careful consideration of the evidence, it turns out that the thing we need to do is focus on spiritual progress and all become monks (or w/e) and then progress can be measured in how rapidly that transition happens.
[Like, in one era the accumulation of slaves would have been a sign of progress, and now we view it as a sign of regress.]
There’s a second point that you might be making, that it’s weird to have a ‘theory of progress’ if your forecasts show the world getting worse, even if we do our best. (For example, suppose there was a massive volcanic eruption and so we knew volcanic winter was coming.) But I think even then it’s important to figure out what ways we can improve in and make those changes, even if the background is decay instead of progress.
But when you continue with “And one that holds up a positive vision of the future.”, it seems to me that you’ve written the conclusion before starting the research.
But there are two kinds of “vision of the future”. One is a descriptive/predictive vision: where are we going, what direction are we headed? That kind of vision ought to be accurate.
The other is a prescriptive/aspirational vision: what should we work towards? What would be ideal? That’s the kind I meant when I said “hold up a positive vision of the future”.
If you don’t have any precise vision yet, how can you be sure that degrowth is not the best option, or at least a good enough one? I’m 100% behind “We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. [...] One that acknowledges the problems of progress, confronts them directly, and offers solutions.” But when you continue with “And one that holds up a positive vision of the future.”, it seems to me that you’ve written the conclusion before starting the research.
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.
IMO there’s a big difference between “obviously material progress is good” and “obviously some progress is good”—it could be that after a careful consideration of the evidence, it turns out that the thing we need to do is focus on spiritual progress and all become monks (or w/e) and then progress can be measured in how rapidly that transition happens.
[Like, in one era the accumulation of slaves would have been a sign of progress, and now we view it as a sign of regress.]
There’s a second point that you might be making, that it’s weird to have a ‘theory of progress’ if your forecasts show the world getting worse, even if we do our best. (For example, suppose there was a massive volcanic eruption and so we knew volcanic winter was coming.) But I think even then it’s important to figure out what ways we can improve in and make those changes, even if the background is decay instead of progress.
You want a negative vision of the future?
I want an accurate vision of the future.
But there are two kinds of “vision of the future”. One is a descriptive/predictive vision: where are we going, what direction are we headed? That kind of vision ought to be accurate.
The other is a prescriptive/aspirational vision: what should we work towards? What would be ideal? That’s the kind I meant when I said “hold up a positive vision of the future”.
More: https://rootsofprogress.org/descriptive-vs-prescriptive-optimism