Featured image: The idiom “jumping the shark” was coined in 1985 by Jon Hein in response to a 1977 episode from the fifth season of the American sitcom Happy Days, in which Fonzie (Henry Winkler) jumps over a shark while on water-skis. The phrase is pejorative and is used to argue that a creative work or outlet appears to be making a stunt in a seemingly exhaustive attempt to generate elevated attention or publicity to something that was once perceived as popular, but is no longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
As the pushback against ESG grows louder, this tone deaf and economically illiterate article pushing pure communism central economic control appears in Nature, with the title and tagline:
Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help
Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.
This article appears just as the pushback against ESG is gaining traction, with multiple US states divesting from ESG and ESG fund managers under investigation for breach of fiduciary duty.
Here are three articles we’ve published within the last week about the negative aspects of ESG.
The article in Nature is more sophomoric and naive than I would normally expect.
The global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates1,2.
Yet many industrialized countries are now struggling to grow their economies, given economic convulsions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resource scarcities and stagnating productivity improvements. Governments face a difficult situation. Their attempts to stimulate growth clash with objectives to improve human well-being and reduce environmental damage.
Researchers in ecological economics call for a different approach — degrowth3. Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being. This approach, which has gained traction in recent years, can enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown while improving social outcomes2. It frees up energy and materials for low- and middle-income countries in which growth might still be needed for development. Degrowth is a purposeful strategy to stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x
The paragraphs above take the myopic view that the problems they note are caused by economic growth and not the push for the opposite, sustainable development, unreliable power generation, as well as the disastrous response of governments around the world to Covid.
The article is not much more than a bulleted list of socialist demands. Since everything is a human right if they want it.
Here is a list of those points sans commentary.
- Reduce less-necessary production.
- Improve public services.
- Introduce a green jobs guarantee.
- Reduce working time.
- Enable sustainable development.
And here are their five key “research” “challenges”.
- Remove dependencies on growth
- Fund public services
- Manage working-time reductions
- Reshape provisioning systems
- Political feasibility and opposition
My favorite of the five was the first, remove dependencies on growth.
Economies today depend on growth in several ways. Welfare is often funded by tax revenues. Private pension providers rely on stock-market growth for financial returns. Firms cite projected growth to attract investors. Researchers need to identify and address such ‘growth dependencies’ on a sector-by-sector basis.
For example, the ‘fiduciary duty’ of company directors needs to be changed. Instead of prioritizing the short-term financial interests of shareholders, companies should prioritize social and environmental benefits and take social and ecological costs into account. Sectors such as social care and pensions need secure funding mechanisms for public providers, and better regulation and dismantling of perverse financial incentives for private providers4.
Balancing the national economy will require new macro-economic models that combine economic, financial, social and ecological variables. Models such as LowGrow SFC (developed by T.J. and P.A.V.), EUROGREEN and MEDEAS are already being used to project the impacts of degrowth policies, including redistributive taxes, universal public services and reductions in working time.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x
So, ESG, wealth distribution, and central economic planning and control. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
I have two questions for anyone that claims to be opposed to the concept of economic growth.
Have you ever received a pay raise?
Are you willing to forego any future pay raises?
If you have a strong stomach you can read this complete indictment of the modern education system here.
HT/Cam_S
Eric Worrall – Charles invited me to add an addendum.
It is not just pay rises zero growth participants would miss.
Most of us change jobs at least a few times in our lives, but changing job is very much an integral part of economic growth. If you move to a better paid job, the better pay is only available because your new employer needs you more than your old employer, and is prepared to pay more for your services. Moving resources from low value uses to high value uses is the very definition of capitalist wealth creation, including when those resources happen to be people moving jobs. Wealth creation is the engine which drives economic growth.
But maybe we wouldn’t want to change jobs, if every job was already perfect.
Zero economic growth and everyone’s needs fulfilled conjures a momentary vision in my mind of The Shire, the idyllic home of the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. A seductive vision of everyone happily working, but not too hard, having a beer at the pub at the end of the day, belonging to the group and village, and trying to work up the courage to ask out that sexy barmaid.
Then reality sets in and the idyllic vision is banished, because the reality to date has always been very different.
Every time zero growth has been attempted on a large scale, the result has always been thousands or even millions of deaths. One of the worst recent examples, the end result of Pol Pot’s attempt to return Cambodia to idyllic agrarian bliss was mountains of skulls – an estimated 1.5 – 3 million people died during Pol Pot’s year zero experiment.
The researchers pushing zero growth seem to be claiming their economic models will help them get it right this time, but the risk of getting it wrong, and the horrific consequences of getting it wrong, are a strong argument for caution.
Some groups who attempt living a simple life have had less horrible outcomes, but the distinguishing feature of the groups which make it work and avoid committing mass murder appears to be that they don’t have locks on the compound gates. People are free to leave, if they find the life doesn’t suit them.
For example, as a student I used to love eating at Hare Krishna restaurants, which were supplied by communal farms and funded by donations.
I never had any urge to join their group, but they were very gentle about proselytisation, at least that was my experience. Working on my uncle’s Christmas Tree farm with hand tools was a great vacation job, but I learned first hand how hard farming can be – so I knew even as a student, this wasn’t the life I wanted.
Not everyone is like me, there are plenty of people who do enjoy a life focussed on goals other than economic growth, who spend many years, maybe even their whole life, living and working in agrarian communes.
So here’s a suggestion – if researchers are so sure of their economic models, why don’t they try to put them into practice on a smaller scale? A self governing Hare Krishna style commune operating on modern zero growth economic models, which trades with the outside economy for materials they can’t source for themselves would be a great small scale test of their theories.
I’m not being facetious, I would be deeply interested in the outcome of such an experiment. I’d probably even want to visit, maybe even stay for a few nights. But I doubt I’d want to live that way for the rest of my life – unless they really do get it right, and find a way to satisfy the needs of everyone, including a hardline capitalist like me.
I need some help here: it seems that in the recent past (say, about twenty years or so), there were one or perhaps two experiments that ended in failure. Fuzzy memory says that either or both (if there were two), were called “BioSphere” or something like that? The premise of the demostration(s) was/(were) that sealed in their own environment, the BioSphere-nauts would be able to grow their own food, have oxygen produced by their agricultural economy, and otherwise be ‘more than’ 100% self-sufficient. There were only a few participants, less than a dozen, I think, and one part of the failure was that a form of ‘tribalism’ developed at a rapid pace. That, and the ‘environment’ was unable to produce enough oxygen for the number of participants (they failed to understand the true source of global oxygen), so in short order, societal chaos became the norm.
Please correct anything I have mis-stated. I’m in my seventies, and only vaguely recall this ridiculous experiment.
Thanks, and my Regards to all,
Vlad
Biosphere 2 – Wikipedia
There is a pretty good article in Esquire magazine on it titled The Biosphere Experiment Sealed Eight People in An Isolated Environment for Two Years (https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a32419584/spaceship-earth-biosphere-true-story/).
Quoting from the article: “The story of what Time magazine later dubbed one of the worst ideas of the 20th century is the subject of the new documentary Spaceship Earth, which is currently streaming on Hulu. Here’s what you should know.“
Authoritarianism, Diversity (i.e. class-based bigotry). Redistributive change schemes. Trickle-down economics. Take a knee, beg, good girl. Now get off my island.
Of all the avowed socialists I knew in school, absolutely none of them envisioned their futures as one of the “workers”. Many of these people were advocates of a socialist “hunter-gatherer” ideology that would be much better for the planet. Interestingly, almost every person I met with this ideology was positioning themselves for a future in academia instead of as a “hunter” or “gatherer”, which you wouldn’t think would require an advanced degree.
They honestly see their futures as comfortable functionaries living in Panem, while everyone else toils on their behalf in the outlands.
My general response was “What’s holding you back? We already have “hunter-gatherers” thriving in among us. We call them ‘the homeless'”. Naturally, they found this equivocation quite offensive.
“The global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year,”
This only goes to show the misunderstanding of economics these people have.
-the global economy is structured around meeting peoples needs.
-the global economy focuses on return on investment.
a. Increased productivity provides higher returns for less investment. This is
not economic “growth” as defined here.
-Increasing productivity means having to chew up *fewer* resources not more.
-The only way to cap growth tied to population growth is to cap population growth.
These idiotic elites need to focus on increasing productivity, not capping population growth. That means cheaper, more abundant energy. It means fostering investment that will increase productivity, not squashing it through taxes, ESG, etc.
Production growth is a response to demand response, which, in part, results from population growth. Now I see the connection.
“The global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed.”
Really? Someone supposedly smart and accomplished enough to get a spot in NATURE actually wrote that? The only countries I know of that do that are the Communist countries. Russia, for example, produced the Lada car for years whether anyone wanted it or not. Most wanted a Ford instead. That is the hallmark of any government that decides what the people need instead of the people making such decisions. China is the same. Both experimented with looser more western economies for a time but both are now going back into the mold for reshaping to the old we-will-tell-you-what-you-need standard. Free economies produce stuff based on demand of the people. The economy grows because smart people keep inventing new, or different or cheaper stuff that people want and somebody produces it. The writer of the article should go back to school.
All while increasing mineral extraction, energy, material, and land use, at rates, and to extents, never before achieved, in a practice of reducing human security and well being.
Konstantin Kisin DESTROYS Communism (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/s_MAm0DeQGE)
Anyone pushing anything even remotely resembling communism (equity, managed economies, etc) are either utterly ignorant of history, or deeply malevolent. These people do not seem to be ignorant of history.
Ever notice that the sort of people who push Marx type social reform tend to also be the people who cast themselves in the admin/organiser type roles?
Remember, In a Worker’s Paradise YOU are still JUST a worker.
What exactly is the formula for creating prosperity without economic growth?
Those shackled to a dystopian ideal like communism do not create economic growth. Which is why Soviet Russia collapsed, and China created private/public capital economic zones and now, today, is pressuring the US on the global currency front.
Increased productivity is the formula for creating prosperity without economic growth.
Private pension providers rely on stock-market
growthdividends for financial returns.Growth, unit price increases, doesn’t make one iota of difference unless “pension providers” are floor traders … which they overwhelmingly aren’t.
Stock prices aren’t very good at defining economic growth.
We have brains wired to do things better. Evolution at work. Change and improvement is guaranteed.
These economic turkeys obviously lust after positions in the government – paid by the taxpayers with bloated time off and ‘free’ benefits.
So the first step in de-growth is to clamp on an automatic annual 2% decrease in the number of public employees. But the most important step is to nullify JFK’s exec order enabling unionization of Federal employees, and to return to a standard of paying LESS for a job description than private industry does – since the taxpayer-paid jobs have far greater job security than the evil capitalists grant.
That’ll at least de-growthify the Feds. And the same principle should immediately be applied to State, County and City employees.
These janitorial chores completed, it will be time to end taxpayer support of “non-profits”, and to enjoy the releasing of their overpaid employees back into the economically productive population.
Did it ever occur to the sheeple that support this stuff that without economic growth the vaults they raid and “redistribute” will eventually be empty?
(Except for the vaults of those who are “more equal” than themselves?)
“Yet many industrialized countries are now struggling to grow their economies, given economic convulsions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resource scarcities and stagnating productivity improvements.”
Economic struggles and resource scarcities are the result of purposeful action (or inaction).
America could be energy independent, and provide cheap, reliable energy to other countries. The only reason we’re not is due to leftist meddling in energy production, and economic growth.
We should have come out of the pandemic 2 years ago, and roared back to the pre-pandemic economy. But the Biden admin did everything they could to stifle it.
Communism pure and simple. If you’re not growing GDP per person, living standards aren’t improving.