How to ‘decouple’ emissions from economic growth? These economists say you can’t.
At least, not fast enough to reach international climate targets.
Instead of making growth greener, economists call for a whole new economic paradigm to address converging social and ecological crises. They call it “post-growth,” referring to a reorientation away from GDP growth and toward other metrics, like human well-being and ecological sustainability.
Thank you, Devil!
I wish more people understood that "constant growth" isn't healthy or good.
Unless you're a cancer cell, I suppose.
@corlin But we've based our economy on scarcity, and create a false sense of "growth" for the last many years, by consistently borrowing more and more from the future. We use resources and energy far faster than we replace them, and create waste faster than we recover it.
You can't infinitely grow in a closed system. The idea is stupid on its face.
It's not that "this is just how things are". This is what we built. We can un-build it and make something functional.
Well said:
A growth based economy is fundamentally incompatible with life on earth. At its root. This is not an opinion, nor a political stance.....
It is god damn physics.
World population in 1750, just before the industrial revolution was about 2 billion.
Given today's technology a sustainable population peaks at about 5 billion.
We are now above 8 billion.
Nor I.
Yet if we change the "measurement" of what we call growth. If we put real social and cultural value on these new measurements.
We might be able to sustain five or 6 billion.
One might be surprised what we could do about the global population if we could make long term contraception free, confidential, and easy to access. Give sterilization the same.
It's too much of a fight in countries like the US currently to get these things, let alone poorer and more sparsely populated countries. Give women a way, and they'll handle a lot of the pop reduction.
Can't tell you how many women I know who tried/failed to get Dr. to sterilize.
Abortion rights and accessibility help too.
Childbirth and childrearing are expensive and painful in so many ways. Make them actual choices for all, more will opt out.
Society moves slowly but it does move.
Mind, I wouldn't suggest anything like the one child policy. I'm a firm believer that it doesn't work to force people to do things like this.
Just give them the tools they need, globally, and wait. Those who want to raise children will still do so. But many are already interested in opting out and just need the tools.
You are being facetious, right?
That's not how a Fiat currency works.
We are not borrowing from the future.
I know you won't believe me, and many classical economists doubt it's existence. But modern monetary theory dispels the Myth.
My irreverent answer is, MMT is not about people, individuals or even large groups, it is about a macro system.
Thermodynamics was developed as an explanation, and a theory, that had great practical outcomes even though it had NO idea about atoms, electrons, and the forces between them.
Yes.
And the "theory" was extremely useful. It also was a macro systems theory. If you talk to MMT people doing the work today, they will shun the word "theory" and use the word framework. For exactly this reason. MMT is not a complete theory, and no one says so. It started as a measurement system. And quickly grew out of the fact that all other measurement systems of an economy were non-predictive.
I got nothing to rebut law 1 and 2.
I do have a belief, (faith), that economic systems based on what is really going on in a fiat currency, can be made much more equitable and just. This is MMT's goal.
@AskTheDevil @corlin Jacque Fresco enters chat
@corlin We live in an almost entirely closed system, yet we accept the idea of an economy that is only "healthy" when it is getting bigger and bigger.
That is the problem.
I'm sure the people who sit at the top of an economy that burns 90% of resources, so they can have 90% of what's left would love an economy that grows and grows.
But it makes no logical sense, and defies physical law.
An economy should reach homeostasis, with excess against destabilizing influences and for innovation.