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Why this rather than a tax to achieve your desired externalities? The problem with this kind of policy is it's very arbitrary - some bureaucracy decides what is and isn't allowed. It also usually comes with a subtext of attacking a particular segment of society that you aren't part of.

If we can remove carbon from the atmosphere or offset it, than a tax equal to that expense during production and used to offset should achieve the outcomes you want. (Ignoring how many programs are poorly built for correctly achieving this real offset).

Why this rather than a tax

Taxes are unpopular. The policy of Enough can be done voluntarily. In fact, I've toyed with the idea of starting a company who's employment agreement requires agreeing to the conditions of Enough. I think it would even be useful for individuals, in private, to consider what their own Enough number is.

Also, taxes don't try to curb unbounded greed and growth. The Enough policy acknowledges unbounded growth is actually the biggest problem.

My “walk away” number is also $10M (in 2018 dollars, based on when I concluded that target).

Trouble with climate is my carbon footprint would likely go up in retirement rather than down, from the time and resources available to travel. Walking around my town and puttering around waiting to die isn’t my ideal retirement; doing that while having the money to do 10x more fun things is worse not better.

(Side note: I don’t expect to ever retire with $10M in even then-current dollars unless we quickly go Weimar in inflation terms.)

> Trouble with climate is my carbon footprint would likely go up in retirement rather than down

This is also one of my pet peeves with the "degrowth" movement's solution to climate change. Essentially they want to alleviate the problems not by innovating to do more with less, but to have people do less. This would mean less work for everyone, but obviously less work means more leisure time. Unless every decides to take up meditating, they're going to consume more during their leisure time, creating not only more work, but also more of every type of negative externality.

It is worth pointing out that alleviating the problem by having people do less (as you put it) is far less of a gamble than betting it all on innovation. Innovation kicks the can down the road. Innovation means relying on a very select few capable of the innovation required, and an even more restricted set of people to finance it.

Also curious is that these compromises are almost never framed as a temporary adjustment to humanity's consumption until the innovation catches up. Would think that's more palatable, but instead it usually seems like "we need to stop consuming like this, forever".

I’m past the halfway point in my life. A temporary adjustment of just say 30 years is forever for me. A temporary adjustment of 70 years is forever for my kids.

I like it. One way to do this is to create a personal consumption budget based on what a normal life would look like if the resources were equally shared and everything was done in a sustainable way. The rich would have to come down many steps of the ladder (and pretty much everybody reading this would be classified as rich) and the poor would be able to go up a bit. I don't think it could be done with 8 billion people though, but doing the math on this is super complex and probably would be years worth of work.

It doesn't work, because "enough" here would have to be something like, maybe everyone lives in a small apartment in a city, is vegan, and doesn't travel much or at all.

Ten mil is way higher than that. It's probably more like a 50k or lower income with no wealth.

For me and for a lot of people I know, this would be a significant downgrade and I'd rather compete to maintain or improve my quality of life.

I don't have ten mil, but if everyone lived like me, we would be buggered.

>It doesn't work

You don't know that. It hasn't been tried, and I daresay you don't even understand what I'm proposing.

One neoliberal capitalist way to implement the Enough system is to make agreement to it a condition of your employment, and also a condition of your investment. You agree to retire and divest as soon as you earn a certain amount. At work, you vacate the role and let someone else try it out. With your investments, you sell and let someone else be a stakeholder.

That sounds terrible. Instead of having surgeon with decades of experience they retire after 10 years because they have enough. Instead building bridges with experience engineers and construction workers, we can let some kid out of college do it.

That's a strawman and you know it.

how is that a strawman?

How many engineers or surgeons make it to $10M of wealth AT ALL, let alone in a period of time short enough to make expertise itself in short supply? The answer is approximately zero.

i'm an engineer in a neighborhood mostly filled with lawyers and surgeons, i can tell you these people easily have 10M of wealth, and these are all people currently still in family building stages of life. Also adding..if this area lost these people as experienced surgeons there would definitely be issues!

> maximize profit until you hit a certain point, then stop

This was explicitly the goal of early capitalist philosophy. Adam Smith envisioned a world where growth came to an end as societies expanded to fill their "economic space".

Smith misinterpreted human desires and motivations; enough is never enough as long as our potential future adversary is also accumulating wealth. Economic arms races ensure there will never be enough.

Maximize profit then stop what?

Stop working. Stop earning income. Make due with what you have in the bank.

You realize that $10M can throw off about $400K/yr for a very, very long time, right? To describe that as “making [do]” seems a little disingenuous to me.

It's better than nothing and you can't please everyone. Read this thread; people are coming out of the woodwork to protest this limit as Marxism. Besides, the actual number isn't really important - acknowledging an upper bound to wealth exists is the key idea. It's an idea I've never even heard discussed.

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

I was thinking about this in the context of wealth inequality and the "existence of billionaires". I don't think that the common refrain of simply attempting to "tax billionaires out of existence" is functional or reasonable. People work hard, then they hit a really good idea and their company sky rockets in value. The notion that there is no ethical way to become a billionaire and that somehow all billionaires are inherently evil is, to me, very naive.

However, Elon Musk shouldn't exist. So how do we stop that? My proposal is a cap on revenue per employee before a company must go public, and a cap on individual ownership of any company. So for example maximum $5m per employee revenue before you have to list, then a single person or entity can own at most 10% of a company.

This means once you hit that figure, you have to list the company and cash out, and let other people step in and take not only responsibility but also share the revenue and ownership more equitably.

That's great! It sounds like we're on the same wavelength.

> IMHO we need a cure that isn't worse than the disease.

Agreed, but you need to realize that one of the symptoms of the disease is the destruction of global civilization as we know it. That's not something we're going to see tomorrow, or in 5 years, but in 10-20 years, if we continue on with the status quo, I would say it's quite likely.

> I think it could satisfy both hard-core capitalists AND environmentalists

Unfortunately not. All the things you mention (air travel, billionaires, etc.) are things that are literally responsible for accelerating the destruction right now.

As far as "draconian" goes, we had 50 years to get something done. We're down to about 5 years before we start seeing the first tier of real consequences now. Draconian is pretty much where it's at for the next several decades, if we're thinking realistically.

Just so you know if you impose draconian measure we rise up and revolt.

Sounds like the consumption problem is solved either way, no?

The idea that capitalism should go to a point and then be stopped is a pretty standard one from Marx. He greatly admired capitalism but believed once it made people rich it would no longer be needed and the workers would naturally take over through revolution. That’s not to say you’re wrong just because you agree with Marx, but rather you should consider why you are so attached to this idea. Marx’s ideas are a type of religion dressed up to look scientific via “historical materialism”. It’s appealing to believe that time is under humanity’s control rather than something outside of humanity, but there’s strong reasons to believe that is false (the universe will last much longer than humans will).

I think you need to re-read Marx, then. I'm not a Marxist, at all, mainly because of the empirical evidence that hardcore redistribution of wealth goes very, very poorly. Frankly it annoys me and worries me that some people associate literally any limit on capitalism with socialism. Adam Smith's invisible hand was driven not by self-interest, but enlightened self-interest.

Putting a hard, generous upper limit on wealth accumulation is not even close to Marxism.

Admittedly Marx is more generous than you- he didn’t want a hard upper limit in wealth and rather thought wealth would increase further after the transition. So yes you do differ from Marx in that you’re a bit harder on people.

You're arguing in favor of unbounded personal greed. You're arguing in favor of cancer, which is any cell that ceases to regulate it's own growth to the detriment of the organism. The unreasonable effectiveness of tools means that the old days of "natural regulation" of human growth has been eliminated, and something needs to replace it. Asking people to stop once they have Enough is just about the least bad option we have to stem the tide.

That works as long as there are no limits to the system in which you are working. But the real world is very much a closed system and you can't externalize the results of unbounded growth of wealth within that system. There is nothing to externalize to! So unbounded growth equals unbounded pollution, unbounded resource depletion and ultimately the crash when the boundaries of the system start making themselves be noticed.

Resource intensity of gdp in developed economies has been decreasing over time. That’s because wealth is not a zero sum game that necessarily requires an exterior to take the negative side of the equation. Rather wealth is created when better options are made available- when actors within the system have superior choices to what they had before. That’s why you see some entertainment media produce outsize returns while others end up failing; it’s not a matter of how much resources are consumed but rather how they’re put together to make a better story (better from the consumer perspective versus their alternatives).

That's true but it's a quantitative element that won't make a qualitative difference in the long run, in other words the outcome will be exactly the same, but maybe a bit later.