Thank you Jérôme. Degrowth theory has its imperfections, partly because it is a young doctrine. But degrowth is not the mother of all evil.

And the "only people who don't live in rich societies are allowed to come up with radical ideas" is an argument I get tired of seeing. Being poor in a rich society is not as bad as living off 1$ a day, but it's not necessarily easy either. Why can't I be allowed to support discussions around degrowth? Because I live in France (on a super low budget)? Am I de facto a spoiled brat?

I have no objections to rich kids coming up with radical ideas. Gautama was born of the highest descent ... it's precisely this opulence that made him more aware of the world's problems (once he noticed them). Being a rich kid can make you all the more sensitive to other people's plight, as you know what you have that they don't. And at least it gives you time to develop your ideas, seeing as how you don't have to survive all the time.

Bah, anyhow I'm kind of used to being attacked all the time for things I do or think:

• Being a vegetarian means you always get mocking comments at dinners (example: I'm sitting with people outside, during summer. A bee starts poking at one of their ham sandwiches. Someone says: "Hey Alex, if a bee feeds off a ham sandwich, doesn't that mean that you can no longer eat honey?").

• Not having a driver's licence and riding a bicycle means you get honked at all day by impatient drivers, and get scoffed at by your peers for having "no independence". Even though you carefully decide each move in town, such as "not pressing on the pedestrian traffic light button, so as not to make dozens of cars stop with their engines running while you cross - and instead crossing at your own risk and peril without turning their light red".

• Not having a mobile phone means you get all sorts of unpleasant remarks from technicians who need to do some intervention in your house, or from company people who need to meet you. Such as "You don't have a mobile phone? Jesus that sucks. Makes it harder for me.". "No it doesn't", you say, "I'll be at home all day, don't worry".

• Eating any amount of organic food means you get all sorts of "pff they use the same water that's loaded with chemicals to grow their stuff" or "organic food is madness, all you get from an apple tree are ugly apples and very few of them, thank god this is not the norm".

• Running regularly means you accelerate the ageing of your body.

• Cutting your own hair means you put barbers out of a job and end up with unequal hair (why should hair lengh be equal??).

• Wearing tongs is bad for your back.

• Supporting the exploration of degrowth doctrine means you're a spoiled brat / rich kid.

etc etc

Just one comment so far... are you all trying to tell me that I should stick to being on holidays?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I'm certainly not going to argue with your take on Le Monde's ridiculous attack on supporters of the doctrine.  I am, however, very skeptical of the doctrine.  The short answer is that I think it's impossible to manage properly.  If growth is zero, what will be the result of (say) productivity gains?  If you fix the size of the pie, who benefits?  Those are the questions that, I think, a reasonable editor would've asked.

GDP growth is not the only factor in poverty reduction, but it is a factor, and it is not unreasonable to bring up China.  Even if recent years have simply seen gains largely among the coastal minorities, they're still gains, and the budget surpluses will allow China to lend a hand to the poor farmers out in the rural provinces.

Or, to take another example, the combination of strong growth and increased spending on social welfare under Kennedy and Johnson led to significant reductions in poverty.  (The two went hand-in-hand.)  Again, GDP is not the only factor, and perhaps, in some cases, not even the most important, but it is a factor.  It allowed Johnson to spend a lot without sending the debt-to-GDP ratio through the ceiling -- or, as my father likes to say when talking about Bush's spending, "Growth covers a multitude of sins."  The 1990s boom led to a reduction, as well, although it, obviously, jumped up again as the recession set in and continued on.

I'm in agreement with Le Monde on the point that humans can, and will, find a way out of the energy crisis and environmental threat.  But, as I pointed out to Miguel on Sunday, we're not using all of the tools at our disposal -- the tax code being the most important, in my opinion.  People respond to incentives, but we're not providing them with those incentives.

Where's your motherf*%&ing flag pin?

Crossposted on dKos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/3/85054/55611 for more exposure for ET...

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

What's tiresome is that this imputation of rich-kid elitism in people he disagrees with is fired off from the comfortable pages of a rich-kid elitist newspaper, Le Monde.

Must be nice to be Pierre-Antoine Delhommais (sounds rich-kid elitist, doesn't it?). He gets to defend an economic system that directs most of the annual added wealth into the pockets of those who already hold an unfair share of the standing stock of wealth, while his conscience is clear because World Bank economists tell him he's aiding the cause of the poor. The rising tide lifts all boats and rocks Delhommais to sleep.

However, there are plenty of people on the centre-left (and even not so centre), who hold this kind of view: productivist, pro-industry, anti-ecologist. In my experience, they are not open to debate. (Delhommais's dogmatism is a case in point). It's as if there were two churches, two belief systems, on the left, one which integrates (and has integrated over the last 30-40 years) the notion of a finite planet into its worldview, the other which seems incapable of it, or steadfastly refuses to try.

The first lot seem to me to hold views that are closer to reality (sorry kcurie ;)). But the second are far more numerous and have the lines of argument most people want to hear.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

Saying there isn't enough for all and that we must learn to share better does not mean favoring poverty

This is the heart of the problem, isn't it (at least once you accept the premise that the planet's resources are finite.)

In already wealthy countries, the year upon year increase in consumption of natural resources must be brought to 0, at least; i.e. GDP growth would have to be brought to 0, or even lower (unless of course we figure out a way to increase GDP without increasing resource consumption).  This will allow poorer countries to continue to grow economically (which will inevitably increase their resource consumption -- again, unless they figure out a way to increase GDP without increasing resource consumption), thereby helping the billions of people who are currently in poverty to obtain higher standards of living on par with people in wealthier countries (assuming of course a fairly equitable distribution of the resulting wealth -- a huge assumption, I know.)

The key is that even if growth and resource consumption continue to increase in poorer countries, globally the rate of resource consumption must not increase, and if possible, should decrease, eventually to the point where the world economy consumes resources at a constant rate within its planetary "budget" of sunshine and what resources we can recycle in a sustainable fashion.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

Mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand I really don't believe that negative growth is inevitable, and no use for those saying that average Westerners need sharp declines in their standard of living.  On the other hand I do agree that there is no way for the world to consume resources at the rate Western countries do, meaning that if poor countries are to stop being poor, Western countries need to consume less resources.  That means lots of changes in behaviour, some with a negligible effect on actual lifestyle, some with moderate ones, but no need for drastic ones (an example of the negligible effect ones is to use far more efficient cars - if you switch from a 15 mpg to a 50 mpg car that's an immense efficiency gain with a minimal effect on lifestyle, more public transport and a change in zoning to discourage sprawl while encouraging higher density living is a moderate change in lifestyle; going less crazy in cooling/heating is another negligible one with big potential gains; shifting electricity production from fossil fuels to renewables has zero effect on how people live).  The problem is that articles like this one either explicitly or implicitly say that we don't need to do anything at all.

I had not heard of the Décroissance party until reading this diary.  Assuming Le Monde's summary of their ideology is accurate, I cannot essentially disagree with their conclusion.

It is one thing to suggest that the world economy as currently constituted does great ecological damage.  It is quite another to suggest that the ecological damage cannot be reversed without limits to the standard of living.  Dire predictions of running out of resources, ecological disaster ensuing etc. have been made before and have not come to fruition.

The barriers to environmental sustainability are not economic, they are political.  There is no technological reason we should not have been able to, say, implement the Kyoto accords.  The reason is that there is a politically powerful oil industry blocking the way.

But do we need an oil industry specifically?  No.  What we need is energy, and giving all the world's people a Western standard of living, entirely through sustainable energy sources, can be done, and would be if there was the political will to do it.

There is no tradeoff, in the long run, between economic growth and environmental sustainability.  It is usually the right wing that claims there is, and pushes to sacrifice the environment.  Now we have pockets like Décroissance on the left that want to sacrifice growth.

How about neither?

Point 1/ GDP is denominated in "deficit-based" money.

Point 2/ with the exception of cash, which is interest-free, this Money is created as (interest-bearing) debt by "credit institutions" aka Banks/Building Societies etc as a multiple of their Capital base in line with BIS requirements.

Point 3/ "Economic Growth" is necessary to create the "wealth" or "money's worth" exchangeable for the further Money required to meet repayments of both capital and interest on these debts.

My understanding is that Interest on Debt is exponential, hence the money supply curves look the way they do.

Therefore a deficit-based monetary system is unsustainable. As is GDP growth.

Am I wrong, or is this how it works?

Best Regards

Chris Cook

Standard of Living means a lot of different things.

Right now, for example, Americans have tons of cheap plastic and electronic crap at their disposal, but very few can swim in any local water (beach, lake, river) w/o fear of contaminants or pollutants.  They have tons of cheap lousy food readily available, much of which contributes to various national-scale health problems which in turn burden the medical system and inflict tragedy on families;  is this a "high standard of living" or a "low standard of living"?  They spend more per capita than any other nation on health care, yet get less for it than other nations.  They have more cars per capita than any other nation, and spend millions of hours (collectively) stuck in traffic and billions of dollars annually subsidising this "private" automobile system (remember the true cost of a gallon of gasoline as mentioned in the Chi Trib feature article?)...

Which is a higher standard of living -- wasting N hours per year stuck in traffic jams in a luxury SUV, or wasting far fewer hours, possibly reading or surfing the web en route, and spending far less of one's annual income on transit, by riding light rail, bus, or heavy rail to work every day?  If the object is to display expensive consumer goods and conspicuous consumption of resources then the SUV solution is the higher standard of living.  If the object is to conserve resources and have more leisure time, then Plan B looks better.

Another note:  the standard of living for Chinese peasants has not held steady while the coastal urban elites have advanced, i.e. a net gain for China as a nation.  The livelihoods of peasants and their living conditions have deteriorated sharply since the land reforms of the 70s, as Peter Kwong's recent reporting from China documents.  Peasants are seeing their communal resources of land and water contaminated by reckless, unchecked industrial colonisation (i.e. using the countryside as a "sacrifice zone" for filthy industries whose profits are funnelled off to the urban cores);  and the neoliberal agenda, Chinese style, as adopted by the current government has revived a level of corruption and nepotism in rural government and administration not seen since the days of the mandarins.  Land reform is being rolled back in some area, foreclosures and confiscations are taking place;  dirty deals and mailfist tactics are being used to displace farmers in favour of carburbs and factories. And then there's desertification which is eating away at Chinese arable land at an alarming rate.  Most of the tens of thousands of public demonstrations taking place in China each year are rural and led by angry peasants.  They're no fools, they know when they're being cheated.

As with the industrialisation of England, China's new "leap forward" enriching the new middle class is being made directly at the expense of the rural peasantry.  They are being herded by Enclosure and by environmental vandalism off the land and into the cities as a refugee class, a pool of wage-slave labour.  The notion that somehow the middle classes are leaping ahead while the peasants are merely waiting their turn -- i.e. one segment moves ahead first, then another, like a centipede walks -- is imho nonsense;  it seems blazingly obvious that the urban elites are replicating the classic core/periphery dynamic and making their "upward mobility" yardage by stepping firmly on the faces of their rural co-citizens and shoving them down into greater and greater misery and poverty.  Which is how "globalisation" is working generally;  to the detriment of the poor and peasants, indigenes and farmers, and to the benefit only of a relatively small percentage of the population in each "advancing" country -- including the US, where the resource and income gap between classes has reached proportions not seen since the "roaring 20's".

A rising tide can only "lift all boats" if there is an ever increasing supply of water.  Otherwise, high tide here means low tide over there.  In a zero sum game, someone has to lose for someone else to win spectactularly.  The history of industrial capitalism is based on one set of people losing spectacularly -- indigenes, the S Hemi, peasants -- and another much smaller set of people winning spectacularly -- Anglo/Euros, N Hemi, landowners, rentiers, technocrats.  Sometimes I wish the pro-growthers would just suffer an  honesty attack and admit what they stand for and what they're doing -- imprison or starve all the peasants and steal their land, forests, water, minerals, oil, fish, and "view lots".  But of course, like all imperialists before 'em, they prefer to pretend they're just doing it for the public good :-)  The mission civilisatrice has become the mission economique -- instead of bringing the gospel of Jesus while robbing the natives blind, we'll bring them the Gospel of the Chicago School while robbing them blind.  Plus que ca change.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

The Work Less Party of BC salutes Le Parti de la Décroissance!


Sandwichman