Painfully dishonest degrowth piece. Here's a teardown.
1. The headline promises maths that isn't there.
"We've done the maths" but the piece contains no calculation. Just two borrowed statistics and a policy wishlist.
2. The 92% figure isn't a measurement, it's a definition.
"Excess" emissions means anything above an equal per-person share of the carbon budget going back to 1850. Define the rules that way and the North is guilty by construction. Pick a different baseline year or allocation rule and the number changes completely. It's a moral framework dressed up as arithmetic.
3. "Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity" is the opposite of the global record.
Extreme poverty fell from roughly 38% of humanity in 1990 to under 9% before the pandemic, almost entirely through growth in China, India and East Asia. Not redistribution. Not aid. Growth. The claim is only half-true for median wages in some rich countries, and they quietly universalise it.
4. The headline contradicts the article's own sixth paragraph.
Headline: growth is doomed. Paragraph six: low-income countries still need growth. So growth works precisely where the poor actually live. That's not a doomed strategy, that's the most successful anti-poverty mechanism in history with a footnote.
5. The decoupling double standard.
This school insists GDP can never decouple from emissions (so growth must end), while claiming GDP has fully decoupled from wellbeing (so growth is pointless). Decoupling is impossible in one direction and total in the other, depending on which suits the argument. In reality 30-plus countries have cut emissions, including imported ones, while growing.
6. "Poverty is manufactured" is backwards.
Poverty is the default condition of our species for all of history. Wealth is what had to be manufactured. Inequality is policy-shaped, fine, but treating destitution as something governments created implies it vanishes once they stop, which no historical evidence supports.
7. "Endless expansion on a finite planet" conflates money with stuff.
GDP measures value, not tonnes. A therapy session, a software licence and a barrel of oil all count. Physical limits constrain material throughput, not value-added, and the two have been diverging for decades.
The two claims that hold up: the top 10% producing nearly half of emissions (solid Chancel/Piketty data) and the debt-servicing figure. Everything structural around them is rhetoric wearing a lab coat.
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I notice you commented on the article rather than the underlying work. I suppose that's your approach to being 'honest.'
'3. "Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity" is the opposite of the global record.'
It very accurately describes the situation in developed countries in the 21st century though.
But that is a function of evening out due to globalization, not growth per se. China has become more like Europe and Europe more like China
It is even worse:
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Dr. Daniel Stelter
@thinkBTO
561 Studies on Degrowth debunked. 90% not studies at all, the rest non representative samples. sciencedirect.com/science/articl
Abhorrent degroth nonsense. Degrowth is a cultural blight on progress, and won't make for a more prosperous future for anyone.
I wanted to like your post. I generally like discussions where people point out poor calculations and assumptions. Yours, however, also engaged in poor assumptions. I was reminded of that biblical verse regarding the speck in someone else's eye and log in your own.
Kommissar political economy in extremis. Point One of about a million: their plan (they say) depends entirely on investment. How would anyone / anything invest without the expectation of a return? I.e., growth.
I think nature has destructive built-in genes in humans. This religion called capitalism is a fucking dangerous idealogical bullshit. Economists are like the fucking priests who think their particular Christians denomination is the right Christian.
It's trivial to refute the growth/emissions coupling argument by picking up your phone and thinking about the full life cycle mass and energy requirements of all the things it and supporting back end systems replace, and all the companies and services that run on it.
Painfully dishonest reply. You gave all you could for us, it was 4% of your power. You decided to order your Pokémon to do the work for you, then you sign your name under the post.
Must be hella tough to be this cool, cannot be bothered to be human anymore.
No 'BAU'?
'Most' 'economic thinking' is 'short run' and 'redundant'? 'It' ignores the 'supply side'?
'Growth' {and 'civilisation'} depends upon 'cheap' F.F. - those so called 'halcyon days' are 'over'. ?
What a long winded way to say this is best of all possible worlds and nobody should question the status quo.
Governments are responsible for poverty. They created and control the monetary, capitalist, society we live in. Inequality is an institutional feature, not an unfortunate byproduct. They control the last 50 years of neoliberalism shows how it has increased
They’ll never concede even with biophysical boundaries we can add value ad infinitum because they don’t want to do the hard bit building profitable big businesses in a circular economy, I doubt they even agree with the potential of this CoR paper..
Good visual below.
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Joachim Voth
@joachim_voth
Found it. All u need to know to think about the Piketty, Stiglitz et al. proposals:
Point 5 seems weak. Emissions are material, well being isn’t, so of course there is a difference. Also there is an important distinction between relative and absolute decoupling. Here relative is used as proof of absolute decoupling.
