The posts I’ve seen here by Maxwell seem to have very high confidence in a conclusion based on a single reason, without considering factors that may have opposite effects or engaging with common arguments by opponents. I’m not exactly a “degrowther” but I don’t think this post is contributing to discourse about that, because:
It mentions the “finite resources” issue that a lot of degrowthers are concerned about, but doesn’t consider it worth discussing, presumably because Maxwell assumes that technological progress and supply/demand automatically solves it—but that’s ideology, not understanding of the science and engineering involved. Will, say, palladium prices go back down to inflation-adjusted historical prices? Maybe not!
His response to something like concerns about increased housing prices from immigration and growth of cities would be “build taller apartment buildings”—but some people just don’t want to live in Hong Kong.
There’s an implicit assumption to this post, which is that the limiting factor for tech development is the existence of ideas, somebody somewhere having an idea for tech. But there are lots of good tech ideas just floating around, and investors aren’t able to find them.
There are already plenty of people concerned about population decline. The governments of Japan, South Korea, and Hungary would like to do something about that. But this post not only doesn’t do anything to change the mind of degrowthers because it doesn’t engage with their arguments, it also doesn’t contribute anything regarding possible solutions.
The posts I’ve seen here by Maxwell seem to have very high confidence in a conclusion based on a single reason, without considering factors that may have opposite effects or engaging with common arguments by opponents. I’m not exactly a “degrowther” but I don’t think this post is contributing to discourse about that, because:
It mentions the “finite resources” issue that a lot of degrowthers are concerned about, but doesn’t consider it worth discussing, presumably because Maxwell assumes that technological progress and supply/demand automatically solves it—but that’s ideology, not understanding of the science and engineering involved. Will, say, palladium prices go back down to inflation-adjusted historical prices? Maybe not!
His response to something like concerns about increased housing prices from immigration and growth of cities would be “build taller apartment buildings”—but some people just don’t want to live in Hong Kong.
There’s an implicit assumption to this post, which is that the limiting factor for tech development is the existence of ideas, somebody somewhere having an idea for tech. But there are lots of good tech ideas just floating around, and investors aren’t able to find them.
There are already plenty of people concerned about population decline. The governments of Japan, South Korea, and Hungary would like to do something about that. But this post not only doesn’t do anything to change the mind of degrowthers because it doesn’t engage with their arguments, it also doesn’t contribute anything regarding possible solutions.