Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to modelling by University of Sydney and ETH Zürich, scaling back total production and placing a cap on maximum wealth would not only save the planet, it would also allow us all to enjoy shorter working weeks and the financial security of a generous universal basic income.
Climate Change Modeling of “Degrowth” Scenarios – Reduction in GDP, Energy and Material Use
By UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY MAY 11, 2021
Well-being can be maintained in a degrowth transition.
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Degrowth focuses on the global North and is defined as an equitable, democratic reduction in energy and material use while maintaining wellbeing. A decline in GDP is accepted as a likely outcome of this transition.
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“We can still satisfy peoples’ needs, maintain employment and reduce inequality with degrowth, which is what distinguishes this pathway from recession,” Mr Keyßer says.
“However, a just, democratic and orderly degrowth transition would involve reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots, with more equitable distribution from affluent nations to nations where human needs are still unmet — something that is yet to be fully explored.”
A ‘degrowth’ society could include:
- A shorter working week, resulting in reduced unemployment alongside increasing productivity and stable economic output.
- Universal basic services independent of income, for necessities i.e. food, health care, transport.
- Limits on maximum income and wealth, enabling a universal basic income to be increased and reducing inequality, rather than increasing inequality as is the current global trend.
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I think it is only fair to give the professors an opportunity to showcase their degrowth theories, by slashing their university funding, so they can demonstrate by example how much happier we would be if we all embraced a permanent reduction in income.
Universities are basically useless these days, just a glorified HS. They should start degrowing and shutting down activities. That will show us they are in it 100%.
With modern Progressivism, it’s always up to someone else to make the real sacrafices, and to pay for them.
Remove the word “modern”; Progressivism has always been about destruction of free enterprise and redistribution of (shrinking) wealth to those with access to power. In essence, an intermediate step to a feudalistic society.
Hey look! Some ivory tower Marxians are pushing Marxism.
Quelle surprise.
We can all be more materially comfortable by reducing production and having less stuff. Genius.
They’ll just get some like-minded people to determine who deserves what.
As Mises observed, the worst nightmare of a socialist is a socialist government… that is run by people he doesn’t know.
Move to the six hour day 30 hour per week from the forty hour week, but four shifts a day for 24/7/365 operations, would put more people back to work. But “a generous universal basic income” is a recipe for nobody has anything, because nobody produces anything. The old East European joke “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” would resurface.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy” is the Great Reset slogan. Owning nothing means you don’t own yourself and would be by definition a slave. Not a recipe for happiness.
Picture in your mind the opening lines of Orwell’s 1984
If you work 30 hours a week instead of 40, expect your income to drop by 3/4ths as well. You must also remember that the cost of benefits such as health care stays the same, regardless of your actual income.
health care charges are grossly inflated BY for profit increasingly OS investment corp intrusions in Aus. and the health funds ditto pushing fees UP
same as Vet fees rose massively as soon as pet insurance took hold. by hundreds of percent over prior costs.
Agree. For the most part Universities (and in many instances K-12 as well) have become a cesspool. Very little emerges from them that the greater society can use, save for great doctors, engineers and some scientists.
Attempts to implement some of the nonsense they espouse will have unintended (or perhaps intentional, but I’m trying to think in ‘glass half-full’ terms here) consequences for years/decades to come.
Tony – are you even sure about Dr’s. A couple of years ago now I struck a young Dr in ER, husbands heartbeat at 30, already known dilated cardiomyopathy patient, caused by possible virus. Young Dr told me to my face that it was his tablets that he had been on for the previous 5 years, I questioned why would suddenly this morning his heartbeat drop to 30BPM, he turned around and asked me where did I get my medical degree from, GRRRRR, I asked him where did he get his because he had a lot to learn. Husband transferred to ward for monitoring, 18 hours later he became very unstable and heartbeat down to 23BPM, at that point they called in the senior consultant. Pacemaker/defib installed a few hours later, that same defib has saved his life at least 3 times I am aware of since. I took the chance at that point to tell him my story, included the bit about me questioning the young Dr’s opinion in ER, consultant not impressed. In front of me and the young ER Dr he wrote on husbands file “Listen to the wife she knows what she is talking about”, Congratulated me on my skills. Over the years he has been the only one who wondered why and where I recognised my husband had a heart condition when multiple GP’s said nothing wrong. I kept insisting there was something wrong but I could not give it a name. Took the consultant to winkle out of me that my father had, later confirmed dilated cardiomyopathy when I was born, so lived with it my entire life, and later when husband developed same I recognised the subtle and not so subtle symptoms. Consultant has never forgotten me either, we met again about a year ago, he asked me how was my blood pressure and had any young dr’s asked about your medical degree with a laugh, we both had a chuckle as I said, they don’t dare your note on file works every time.
In the UK, sadly, the British Medical Association or BMA, unofficially known as Bloody Mendacious & Arrogant, have been infected & diseased by the feminist politically correct totalitarian movement! In 2010 when the Cameron guvment was elected, within a few weeks, reps from the BMA were in the cabinet office pounding the table, demanding, not suggesting, not recommending, but demanding minimum pricing alcohol for the peasants, err sorry the public, yet at the same time, said BMA had a planning application in to Westminster Borough Council, for a 24 hour drinking licence!!! I fully accept & understand that if we here want a 24 hour Health Service, it’s inevitable, a doctor comes off shift at 09:00hrs after 12 hours graft, he/she may just feel like a drink before going home for “supper” & bed!!!! The timing was crap & at the very least, undiplomatic in its timing!!!! Yet again last year when lockdown was introduced, BMA reps were on the news on high-brow programmes, complaining with great concern, that the British public weren’t handling the crisis very well, because sales of alcohol were going through the roof in supermarkets/corner shops!!!! It took around 15 minutes before the interviewer pointed out that all the pubs, bars, clubs, etc, had been shut due to Covid restrictions, & that according to their research, sales per se were no more or less than usual, merely the means of provision/supply had changed, nothing more!!!! They have become the classic DAISNAID, “Do As I Say, Not As I Do!!!!”. It’s so Orwellian, trying to dictate how we should/must live our lives to a politically correct prescription!!!! It’s just the first step!!!!
Yes, I’m in Canada and new doctors and others don’t seem to doctor anymore. Symptoms go into a computer based system, I think called whole health, not sure. I live with two undiagnosed conditions and it’s best guess,come back if it gets worse. But I believe the bigest scandle is to come with covid. Not sure where you folks are but if diagnosed when home or even at hospital people are sent home or told to stay home. That’s it, no advice for prophilaxis, not even vitamin D or zinc. People get worse and end up in the ECU when many could have been avoided.
Having gone back to work at a university, I’d say you are very close to being completely correct. There are some bastions remaining in chemistry, physics and engineering and perhaps elsewhere, but even these are under assault as funding requires one to identify as woke.
Communists outnumber everyone. Conservatives don’t stand a chance in the open. Fortunately, there are students that are serious and want to learn. I was heartened to hear from almost every student graduating this year that they felt cheated for the way classes, especially labs, were run remotely.
I was full time in academics for several years and part time for many years in health sciences (taught pathology). There is an incredible waste of time. Meetings that should have lasted 10 minutes dragging on for 2 hours etc. I left after 2 years and went into private practice but stayed on as an adjunct. Politics didn’t enter into my time there fortunately.
It is so easy to be a Communist or Socialist when not living in a country that actually identifies as such. In the safe confines of the university community one never needs to actually experience the privation of Communism/Socialism in action, it is more than enough to claim to be one, yet another form of virtue signaling. How many of these self-proclaimed Communists/Socialists availed themselves of the opportunity to emigrate to the USSR back in the day or to Venezuela today? I am especially amused by the wealthy sitting in their comfortable homes but lusting after the “equality” that would fall to everyone “if only” we could embrace one of these utopian systems world-wide!
I agree, the regrowth should start with the Universities and the people that run them, matter of fact just shut them down and put the idiots who advocate this Supidity on welfare and segregate them from decent society.
Here in the States, since Obama federalized the student loan program, Universities have become the greatest source of wealth transfer from the middle class to the faceless cultural elite. I should say debt placed upon future generations of an ever shrinking middle class.
Tuitions have skyrocketed over the past two generations. The last vestige of individual responsibility, to pay back borrowed funds, has been removed for our future Brown Shirts of Socio/facist America. “Go to college, learn to hate you forefathers, renege on you loan obligations, get a useless government bureaucrat job and spy on your private sector neighbor. Nearly half the country today derives their livelihood from government at some level.
Forgivable Government Loans now support a flawed inflationary system of indoctrination where colleges teach public school graduates how to read then fill their heads with visions of apocalyptic doom and gloom that can only be ameliorated by turning over more power to central authoritarian government. Salvation from hobgoblins can be yours with just a little trust in leadership. Only problem is, for every hobgoblin slain two spring up in its place. The “Fourth Estate” propaganda ministry will make sure of that.
Forget University, get an apprenticeship. You will save a shedload of money as well as being paid, albeit a modest wage, and will end up more competent and useful to society.
Any academic needs can be made up via night school or day release.
I have a niece doing exactly that at the local nuclear power station which is being expanded.
Mr. Powers: Brilliant analysis! I’m nine days late on seeing this, but better late than never. Keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to more of your comments.
Tom Gelsthorpe
Yes. I would like to see the Live Your Ideology Act. So these idiots can degrowth, redistribute tenure and grades and grant money. That would last about a nanosecond.
Great comment Pauleta! As always the asterisked PhDs dont think their idiotic ideas through. Having impoverished the masses, they would have to slash tuition by 90% and take commensurate pay cuts themselves! I guess they would achieve the degrowth but not voluntarily.
Alternatively, they would only be able to accept well-to-do students (albeit with their wealth capped). These would tend to be the smartest and high achiever folk like it used to be. A bit intimidating for our asterisked, intelligence-capped professors I would say.
wouldnt mind seeing most reduced a LOT
and funding to TAFE to enable REAL productive future workers instead of social sciences deadweight the unis spew out
Well, Progressivism does excel at making people poor. The middle class anyway.
Although, I do have to admit that this does have a certain appeal: People lacking hard trade or survival skills would quickly disappear because such a subsistence economy would lack the luxury of being able to afford frivolous academics. The planet would be pretty much cleared of useless people like those who come up with this nonsense in only a few years.
No they would just wind up homeless in California:))
Even Californian’s will lose their tolerance for them when they won’t know where their next meal will be coming from.
Wow! University Professors are proposing that humans intentionally retrograde their culture? By the way, billionaires have a tendency to avoid the attempted grasp of socialists/marxists/democrats by seeking economic sanctuary elsewhere. I think we should wait for the Professors to start living in tents and cooking over a buffalo-chip fire before we take them seriously. Don’t bother to wait for it.
This shows how a successful society commits suicide before anyone conquers them from the outside. But no, the dopes who give out the doped Kool-Aid exempt themselves, and do NOT move into tents. Only the peasants have to do that. That’s why feudalism lasted so long.
And yet they refuse to live in poverty themselves.
I work at a university. I know a person who built her career by slamming methane production by the coal seam gas industry. She’s been promoted through the years. Now she is at the top. Bought a small farm. Raising cattle.
Bullship leads to bullship.
Hypocrisy pays!
Let’s start by relieving them of the burden of their endowments.
and sabbaticals
And pensions.
I have several friends, now retired from academia, & saddened to say they really do live in a world of their own! Guaranteed work, they don’t have to go out in the big wide world to earn it & compete for it, guaranteed holidays outside of term time, sick leave, etc! Sure they work in the evenings marking school work, I get that, but being self-employed I had to frequently work in the evenings & weekends doing paperwork & practical work to boot!!!! They do live in a very secure protected environment, some would say sheltered from the real world!!!! Yes teaching can be very stressful I know as a former school governor, but the upside outweighs the downside!!!! Ask most self-employed people if they ever get stressed, dealing with grumpy clients, who know all about how you should do your job because they’ve watched a couple of building/construction shows on tv, it all looks so easy & simple, then chasing them for the money, then getting caught up debating the bill which they “know” for a fact, despite having agreed the fee beforehand, is way too much, especially for a few bits of paper!!! These academics live in a sheltered world, protected from reality, & some even think they are above……..God!!!! 😉
I’ve been self employed since the early ’70s- so I agree completely. And, I’ve had to deal with bureaucracies at every level. They contributed little to the process but ate up a lot of my time with nonsense.
Let’s also see what debt obligations they have and what their endowment looks like.
Only in Academia living in Ivory Towers, sealed off from the real world of work and productive industry could people come up with such stuff.
Just another example why William F Buckley wrote 60 years ago,
A more modern day reading of these types comes from Nassim Nicolas Taleb. BlackSwan author Taleb describes in his follow-on book Skin in the Game these university types as “IYI’s”, intellectual yet idiot. Below are the relevant passages from Skin in the Game on what an IYI is and how he/she thinks and sees the world. I highly recommend the book.
Intelligence actually helps if you are trying to create a plausible argument for something that is quite obviously wrong.
If people who do that actually believe in what they are arguing for, they are fools.
If they know they are propagating falsehoods, they are scoundrels.
I’m not sure what the ratio is in a typical university.
It is an example of sophistry, where winning the argument is more important than discovering the truth.
Sounds like your average climate scientist. Or climate troll.
You first, greenies. Get yourself a lower-paying job, smaller house/apartment, no vacations, no car. Dig your own wells without machinery. Make your own clothes out of the thread you spin from the few sheep you keep.
If it looks like you’re having a good time and prospering, the rest of us will follow.
Bomb throwing from behind the tenured rampart is a sport don’t ya know.
Why didn’t our ancestors think of that utopia, I wonder.
They weren’t a bunch of spoiled brats who never had a care for the necessities of life. They were staring down death for themselves and their loved ones every day, and gave us the greatest gift possible – perpetual prosperity – that the green nutters are trying to throw away in disdain.
You could be on to something there.
Off subject- sorry, but:
Biden’s Not-So-Clean Energy TransitionThe International Energy Agency exposes the hidden environmental costs and infeasibility of going green.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-not-so-clean-energy-transition-11620752282
You can only read part of it without a subscription. I managed to read it in a library. This might be a good item for one of the editors here to write an essay on. But I could copy the following from the web site.
“The International Energy Agency, the world’s pre-eminent source of energy information for governments, has entered the political debate over whether the U.S. should spend trillions of dollars to accelerate the energy transition favored by the Biden administration. You know, the plan to use far more “clean energy” and far less hydrocarbons—the oil, natural gas and coal that today supply 84% of global energy needs. The IEA’s 287-page report released this month, “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” is devastating to those ambitions. A better title would have been: “Clean Energy Transitions: Not Soon, Not Easy and Not Clean.”
The IEA assembled a large body of data about a central, and until now largely ignored, aspect of the energy transition: It requires mining industries and infrastructure that don’t exist. Wind, solar and battery technologies are built from an array of “energy transition minerals,” or ETMs, that must be mined and processed. The IEA finds that with a global energy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.
The world doesn’t have the capacity to meet such demand. As the IEA observes, albeit in cautious bureaucratese, there are no plans to fund and build the necessary mines and refineries. The supply of ETMs is entirely aspirational. And if it were pursued at the quantities dictated by the goals of the energy transition, the world would face daunting environmental, economic and social challenges, along with geopolitical risks.
The IEA stipulates up front one underlying fact that advocates of a transition never mention: Green-energy machines use far more critical minerals than conventional-energy machines do. “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power plant,” the report says. “Since 2010, the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables has risen.” That was merely to bring wind and solar to a 10% share of the world’s electricity.”
“A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car”. And much more of the conventional car is easily recyclable.
On a related article on May 8th I wrote, “If it can’t happen, it won’t as it applies to finding and securing the amount of mineral resources needed to drive this unreliable energy crazy train in the name of a climate scam.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/08/wheres-the-lithium-nyt-notices-a-lot-more-lithium-needed-for-bidens-electric-vehicle-push/#comment-3242385
Here at WUWT, numerous blog posts and countless informed commenters have been saying for years exactly what was noted in the IEA report: there simply are not the mineral resources to do what the climate scammers claim, which is largely stop using oil, coal, and natural gas to attempt to achieve some some net zero (GHG emission) goal by some arbitrary date sometime in the next 30 years.
Ignorant Joe Biden and AOC and all their dumb ilk may not realize this. Dementia Joe just parrots whatever is placed in front of him to read these days. But others with a much more sinister, malevolent intent for the Western capitalist democracies do understand the un-achievability of the climate scammers “net zero” squawkings with regards to mineral resources to carry out such claimed transistion. The malevolence comes from the obvious g e n o c i d a l implications of such a pursuit and what it means for delivering a NWO and total political power to the Left in Western world.
The plan is to reuse all the current metals. I found this out when I had the displeasure of doing the most useless training course in my workplace. The “Wales essential tool kit” is bursting full of propaganda about how many tons of metal like copper exists already, circular economy and why growth is bad.
Ii did a little searching and I found a complete, or at least, MORE complete posting of this report. It gives credit to the WSJ so I hope it’s ALL of it.
https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2021/05/12/bidens-not-so-clean-energy-transition/
Right!
I’ve got an even better title: “Clean Energy Transitions: Dirty, Ineffective, Massively Expensive, Completely Impractical and Colossally Stupid.”
“Universal basic services independent of income, for necessities i.e. food, health care, transport.”
Yea, you get everything “food healthcare, transport”. Everything except freedom and choice what kind of food, where and how to transport, and what treatments you get.
Any government powerful enough to give you everything is powerful to take it all away and oppress you.
This would seem to be behind the Biden immigration policy to solve world poverty by importing it to America.
“Degrowth focuses on the global North”
University of Sydney exempting the lucky Aussies from future poverty!
Yes, Eric need not be concerned. He’s safe.
Could someone do a time lapse animation of the university crumbling into dust?
My belief is, the only thing that can truly impact birth rates is wealth. With enough general wealth, entertainment options open up, and there are many things for people to do to occupy their time. With poverty, there’s one option that’s free, but results in increased birthrates. Especially when the people wish to have children, but children have a low survival rate, also due to poverty. I doubt they’re really going to work to spread real wealth.
Brilliant! Up until the warmunists appeared, we were moving the third world rapidly into the first world. Ironically, if we hadn’t been interfering with the modernization of the third world, the increasing world population would probably have been solved already.
I think this is great – I hope it is a trend that grows. The more that climate propagandists actually reveal the truth of their agenda (anti-human and pro-political-power) the more average people will stop buying their crap.
The trouble is that too many are deluded into believing there actually is a “climate crisis,” because they’ve been getting saturated with propaganda about it for three decades now in its current form.
Until we have a “Morpheous” to pull them out of the “Matrix,” people might just buy into this lunacy.
Some universities require its instructors and research to enter the job market periodically.
This looks like the communist plan, to each according to his needs and the elites will determine needs. And elimination of the middle class.
Equity should be on the merit system of employment and not the killing of incentive with equal reward. Shorter hours eliminate companies providing benefits.
Congratulations, you own this one boys…..
Drop in Xinjiang birthrate largest in recent history: report (yahoo.com)
From one-child to selective-child… excess human lives… a dysfunctional orientation… a wicked solution… social progress.
That said, men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature/nature.
The US saw a 4% drop in birth rate last year.
Salaries at the University of Sydney: average of $70K ($53,900 USD) for “Exam Manager” (whatever that is) to $197,000 ($151,690 USD) for Professor.
Average annual individual earnings for an Australian: $66,575.60 ($51,263.21 USD).
Looks like quite a bit of room there for redistribution…
How about we “degrow” the very universities where these preposterous ideas are fermented? Tax the cr*p out of there vast investments and start a Stupid-TAX on their staff?
Without powerful labor unions- the professors would see a huge drop in their salaries- based on their actual value. One way the profs get so much is that the schools now have adjuncts do much of the work at very low pay- freeing up money for the tenured profs. They won’t admit that of course. Oh, and a lot more money for the administrators too.
In Australian universities IQs have gone walkabout
Yes, everybody with equally nothing…
I seem to remember vaguely someone tried this once before…how did that turn out again?….
oh yeah, TENS OF MILLIONS DEAD!
Jeez, these commie professeurs just can’t leave it alone, how much proof do you need for christ’s sake?
Communism doesn’t work, just stop, have you no shame?
“foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich nation and giving it to the rich people of a poor nation”
>> with more equitable distribution from affluent nations to nations where human needs are still unmet<<
good luck getting the self styled elite and the oligarchs to give up their stolen cash for the good of the great unwashed.
Labour utopia.
And then gone is the incentive to actually get an education to do anything, right? Would we be assigned a profession then, and then be required to get the appropriate training?
They will respond by making a university degree mandatory in order to get a job.
thats pretty much what we have now
useless uni grads in jobs non uni staff would do far better
“by slashing their university funding”
It doesn’t apply to future party elite and budding members of the coming committees for public safety. They’ll be the ones to supply rope and pavers, and holding cloaks.
Exactly. Time to roll back on the pomp and circumstance of “advanced education,” more correctly referred to these days as “advanced indoctrination” anyway. Cut those budgets and educational institution staff salaries, close some of those grandiose buildings, cut the “sports programs” that have nothing to do with education, reduce the tuition massively to more correctly reflect the lack of value in their “product,” and reduce the number of students that won’t learn anything of use to allow them to succeed in life at such “institutions” anyway.
But of course, they didn’t men THAT. As usual, it will be “rules for thee, but none for me.”
Will they start with the top 100 companies and those owning/running them who have an inordinate amount of wealth and power? Will they then move on to those with a turnover of $1 billion? If many who are working very hard in the private sector are earning less than government employees should the latter not be the next target? Let’s see how this works out before extending this.
Only one proviso to ensure equality: no work no food for those fit and healthy.
i grew up poor-you dont work? you dont eat was basic
Go for it. Let’s “degrow”every academic institution that feels this is a great strategy and not just a pathetic attempt to hide their plan to turn the western world into the old Soviet Union, or, even better, the world of George Orwell’s 1984.
Good grub at the municipal feeding trough I bet.
The universities pushing this agenda should give away their fat endowments to the poor to show their commitment. The agenda is just some sort of odd signaling, some thing not connected to reality. It could be group think insanity. It could be brain damage from hyper ventilation and excessive jaw flapping due to lecturing.
“a just, democratic and orderly degrowth transition would involve reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots”
I’m not voting to give these guys a free ride and create mass poverty for the rest of society in the process. When you read these kind of statements you wonder what part of this process would actually be democratic. I’m thinking that their version of democracy is one where the elites get together at a luxury resort and vote on the level of poverty for which the other 99% should live. Thanks but no thanks.
I guarantee you that, just like Obamacare, the public won’t be allowed to vote on it.
The unstated assumption here is that there is a fixed amount of money in the world, and by limiting how much some people may acquire, there will be more left over for everyone else. This ignores the possibility of wealth creation (and destruction), particularly by creative people that find new ways of doing things and bring new products to market, like computers and smart phones. During the Great Depression there was destruction of wealth, and people were poor because of a shift in the economy, not because of a lack of workers or resources.
In a technological world, wealth is more a reflection of the availability and application of energy than it is anything else. Looking at ‘money’ as being a fixed quantity, and creating social policies based on that view, could do serious damage to the well being of the world.
They assume that income inequality in and of itself, is a bad thing.
If one person’s salary doubles, while another person’s salary goes up by 50%, how has either suffered?
While there is a distribution of ‘poverty’ or of ‘wealth’ (negative poverty) there will be a left-tail and a right-tail where I will be. The poor will always be with us.
” the gap between the haves and have-nots, “
People are not divided into the “haves and have-nots”. By and large people “have” what they “earn”. Therefore, the world is actually divided into the “earners and non-earners”. This is why spending public money on the poor and homeless doesn’t solve their problems. They are still non-earners.
Back in the 80’s, some wag calculated that if we stopped every welfare program and just gave the money directly to the current recipients, poverty would be instantly eliminated.
Welfare has only grown since the 80’s.
That’s because liberals make the mistake of thinking poverty is the condition of not “having” enough money, when it is really the condition of not “earning” enough money.
Governor Newslum just announced a $2 billion plan to “end homelessness” in California. Any bets on how much homelessness grows in the next 5 years?
And most of them would be back in poverty within weeks.
Only a socialist is innumerate enough to believe that limiting someone else’s income, will make you richer.
Capitalism already provides an excellent way to decrease the income gap.
Get off your lazy butt and get to work!!!
Do I see the beginnings of a new Great Famine? Thank goodness I live in a democracy where at least there’s some chance that this totalitarian socialist nonsense can be overturned.
“Bullying works in public, but people vote alone” – Joanne Nova
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” – Winston Churchill again
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” – Margaret Thatcher
The great famine caused by Mao Tse Tung is still effectively unreported in communist China.
“The Great Famine remains a taboo in China, where it is referred to euphemistically as the Three Years of Natural Disasters or the Three Years of Difficulties. Yang [Jisheng]’s monumental account, first published in Hong Kong, is banned in his homeland.” – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone
“I was cheated and I don’t want to be cheated again.” – Yang Jisheng
I remember as a kid watching various tv shows and cartoons even, that mentioned in the future, because of robots and technology, we would all have greater ‘leisure time’ and reduced work works – they were right, in a sense, when so many got laid off when industry left North America and Europe. But of course the leisure time ended with your unemployment benefits, and one had to work several McJobs to match the decent industrial income.
Why limit the incomes and wealth of people like Musk and Bezos, who have thousands of workers grateful that they exist. Cap the wealth, hand out free money, and no one will bother working.
It’s a fact, if we didn’t get kicked out of Paradise, would we all be naked and homeless.
“... generous universal basic income“. Sounds like Mark Twain’s town where the population all made their living taking in each other’s washing.
So, do they plan to reduce all of the salaries of the professors and administrators of their universities by 50%..
I didn’t think so.
It’s been said often that if an idea, proposal or theory is asinine enough, it’s a virtual guarantee that it will be adopted, embraced or promoted by some branch of academia. This article if further proof.
Strongly support starting with impoverishing the universities first. Because so many of them have lost the plot on STEM, they have lost faith in their ability to problem solve. Lets just defund them since they are effectively admitting they have nothing to offer the peasants who re required to pay for them.
Their solution to “climate change”, universal poverty.
Agenda 21 includes a Happiness index, which is a little creepy to start with. However, they also believe that they can have people THINK they are happy when they really should not be.
My first thought is they are going to hand out drugs. Oh, wait, they are, promoting legal and illegal drugs. Then, they simply want a dumber, brainwashed people, which the public schools are doing quite nicely. Ban cholesterol for children and they will be even dumber.
Won’t that lead to under-employment? The devil makes use of idle hands.
WTF
these idiots are brainwashing your kids… your daughters go in as daddy’s little girl and, 4 yrs later, they come out as unrecognizable feminazis… the inmates are truely running the asylum… it’s revival or bust for the USA (yes, that means turn our collective eyes back to God, morality, and truth)
“…universal basic income…”
Welfare, people reliant on Govn’t. Where will the money come from in your computer models? I have lived in a country where a persons outlook was to receive money on the dole (Welfare).
Almost ashamed to admit I received my degree from Sydney University many years ago. ETH was also a good university many years ago- we lived in Zurich many, many years ago when dad was on sabbatical in Zurich, so I happen to be familiar with ETH from 50 years ago (I am getting old.)
Sydney University has become so Marxist it isn’t funny. As for the call for lowering standards of living, you can bet that the parasitic academics won’t accept this for themselves. It is fine for others to have a lowered standard of living- equality- everyone all equally poor.
“According to modelling”, stopped reading after that opening statement! Puter says “no”!!!! Puter says “yeah”!!!! simples!!!! Does anyone know how regularly “Deep thought” gets an overhaul, it sure needs one very soon!!!! Why is it that none of these “models” (not real situations, just models) are never verified by independent bodies or authorities? Just a rhetorical question, I already know the answer!!!! 😉
“According to modelling by University of Sydney…”
It disappoints me every time I see articles like this. I live in Sydney and, apparently, Australia is the lucky country. LOL
I’ve just read something along those lines in the following blog (https://der-kleine-akif.de/).It’s in German, but there are enough translators around: “Enteignet Bill Gates” (a wealth cap of 1 billion dollars is mentioned… it’s quite hilarious…).
Much like UK Rationing during WW2. I don’t suppose we would get a Ration Book containing clip-out coupons for our meat, etc. allowances. All electronic nowadays.
But Spivs and the black markets would thrive.
Can someone please tell these academic muppets that people have already tried communism, and it was crap.
Does this mean the great UN North-South redistribution of wealth scheme is officially dead?
The study is entirely consistent with converting to socialism, which has been the real goal of the greens and the ecologists all along. They don’t understand that the economic decline will go far below comfortable – and may lead to a counterrevolution.
I have often said that the ultimate goal of all leftists is to impoverish, humiliate, and demoralize the lower classes. Here is my proof.
The Pope says…
Pope raises alarm about Italy’s precariously low birthrate – ABC News (go.com)