Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

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Dumb paper. What the author calls degrowth, it is living in a more primitive and old fashion way. Neighbor Albania and Italy have this problem as well. There are plenty of villages where people live like it is still the early 1900s.

The author forgot to mention that they have one thing in common: all this villages it is mostly older people that live there, with few young ones left, mostly doing agriculture related work.

Most young people have left these villages due to the lack of economic opportunities. So, this thing called ‘degrowth’ is just economic stagnation.

Also, you don’t have to travel in Europe to see this. We have the Amish folks here, and that’s what a successful ultimate degrowth is. In Southern Europe it is mostly forced due to economic conditions.

There are a lot of left wing radicals that advocate for ‘degrowth’, but that ultimately is advocating for poverty, and bring the US back to the 70s.

The libertarian view of degrowth, is to leave like a ‘homestead farm’, while the left version is to live in some giant communist coop where people consume only what’s needed, but this time it is with the ‘old fashion” twist.

52 failed attempt at communism should have given them a clue that it doesn’t work.

Degrowth = poverty for the masses, while still few elites enjoy and live a lavish life.

I'd like to offer a differing perspective. Let's say you have a company that makes shoes. You attract investors by growing steadily at 3% a year. At some point, the market becomes crowded or monopolized such that you can no longer grow at 3% by attracting new customers or creating new products. So you start to increase profit by reducing your margins-- using worse materials and worse construction methods. You use planned obsolescence to increase the number of times customers have to buy your products.

Ask yourself, once this inflection point is reached and quality is no longer increasing, does a growth economy make sense? At this terminal stage of economic growth there is an increase in negative externalities in the pursuit of ever-diminishing profits. Much more waste as the shoes are built with worse and worse materials. More exploitation in an attempt to reduce labor costs. Do you think that over the last 30 years, shoes have increased in quality relative to the profit margins of these companies? If the answer is no, then it means we need to figure out a way to deal with terminal-stage industries.

Sure, there are people advocating for everyone to go live like the Amish, but to me degrowth means that if an industry can no longer achieve growth through innovation or increases in productivity, we should acknowledge that that industry has peaked, and not try to squeeze every last dollar out of it through exploitation or waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns

I have a very hard time reasoning about this stuff.

It seems to me the current choices, dictated by culture, capital, and economics, are a) grow or b) decline.

Is a steady state possible? Can a cobbler, independent farmer, carpet cleaning service, or whatever, do their thing for 40+ years?

I don't know.

Certainly not if they accept outside investment capital, where the lender is expecting an ever greater return on their investment.

Certainly not if when there are predators. eg "Your margin is my opportunity" -- Jeff Bezos

Certainly not if your gig is mooted by technological progress.

Examples of successful steady state ventures would help me (us) think through these issues. But I'm struggling to think of some. Residential plumber (and similar trades)? Automobile mechanic?

I think that's the big question isn't it? We're now at a point in human history where a few percentage points of annual growth, when compounded, can lead us into an extinction event/societal collapse. The big question of the 21st century is how long can this continue before we have to hit the brakes?

The closest thing I can think of is small family-owned ventures. Or on a larger scale perhaps the Cuban cigar industry? It remains labor intensive and is locked to a specific region which means growth prospects are limited. It also exists under a socialist regime so there's no incentive for growth.

Doesn't Japan have a tradition of long surviving privately held companies? Perhaps there are some lessons there

> Back in 2008, a Bank of Korea report found that of 5,586 companies older than 200 years in 41 countries, 56% of them were in Japan. In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200211-why-are-so-man...

I've often wondered why Japan seems to maintain a culture of high quality artisinal work when the rest of the world is trending toward cheaper, lower quality mass produced goods. Perhaps these are related.

I am not sure. I think that while there are concepts like Kaizen that stress improving efficiency, Japanese businesses don't necessarily optimize for profit as ruthlessly as US companies. They can probably do this due to less disruptive entrepreneurship in Japan + massive conglomerates with no competition.

For example there is a video series of workers in Japan-- the titles are usually like "Daily Life of an X in Japan" and workers are often doing things in their downtime like cleaning the office, detailing the delivery trucks, power washing the sidewalks in front of the business, etc. In the US these practices would be seen as wasteful and would either be ignored, contracted out, or have a dedicated employee to do the work.

Unfortunately the Japanese model has its own shortcomings, but maybe there is a hybrid option that could benefit everyone.

It's hard to stop growing because you will be outcompeted by those who continue growing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

What does that have to do with the voluntary poverty movement? How ate “degrowth” and allocating resources based on prospects for growth related?

I'm not sure I understand your question. The point I was trying to make is that moving away from a growth-based economy is inevitable on a planet with finite resources. It doesn't mean we all need to live in mud puddles and eat slop.

> The libertarian view of degrowth

Libertarians don't advocate degrowth or even homesteading per-se. Some of the Free Stat Project people are into it, but not many. The homesteaders I've met seem to often be traditionalists or green types who got disillusioned with city/suburban life.

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